Retrospective futures
Mhairi McIntyre | I wrote this piece as a reaction to current discussions of declining bee numbers. Even though I’m highly allergic to bee stings, I remember my childhood filled with honey sandwiches. I imagined a world without bees, where there would be no flowers, no trees and no environment. — The world is different. I…
David McCooey | This poem is from ‘After Kubrick’, a loose sequence responding – sometimes obliquely, sometimes directly – to various films by Stanley Kubrick. It is a companion piece to Maria Takolander’s ‘Alien Signals: Poems After Stanley Kubrick’ in her Ghostly Subjects (Salt, 2009). — Notes on 2001: A Space Odyssey Inside, there is…
Andy Hageman | Science fiction is a genre finely-geared to the work of re-imagining global warming at this crucial time when Gaia Hypothesis innovator James E. Lovelock is claiming in A Rough Ride to the Future that we need to shift strategies from abatement strategies to consolidating and preparing for inevitable ecological catastrophe. Whether we take…
Elana Gomel | Posthuman subjects in SF are often marked by extreme corporeal modifications, hence the genre’s narrative zoo of cyborgs, mutants, and human-alien hybrids. Far rarer but also more interesting is a posthuman subject whose difference is located in its/his/her psyche. Such subjects challenge humanism more profoundly and unsettlingly than does the cyborg. The humanist…
Isiah Lavender III | “Why study race in science fiction?” Answering that personal question, the heart of my professional being, requires Doctor Who’s TARDIS, preferably accompanied by the fourth (Tom Baker) or tenth (David Tennant) incarnation of the Doctor. — I fondly remember watching television shows in my childhood like Doctor Who, Buck Rogers, and V.…
Retrospective Futures emerged from an open-themed October edition, where a number of related issues soon began to coalesce around a clearly identifiable theme: for in their different ways, all the pieces in this episode engage with aspects of SF that acknowledge the past as a way of re-imagining our future. The contributors reflect on their…