Til Knowles | I have no culture, no humane harmony in my brains. I can’t live without culture anymore. What do you want from your science fiction? Detailed descriptions of non existent utopias? Interstellar wars fought with weapons blueprinted from tomorrow’s technology? Humour? The meaning of life? We are lucky enough to be living in…
Rebecca Hutton, Alyson Miller, Elizabeth Braithwaite | Science fiction, according to Istvan Csicsery-Ronay Jr. (2008, 187), “elicits from its audiences a feeling of hesitation facing two intertwined but distinct questions about the imaginary world represented in the text. On the one hand, it asks whether the imaginary changes are possible; on the other, what their…
Lenise Prater | Andrew Milner has recently argued that fantasy and science fiction (and utopia) are ‘cognate’ genres: “above all, because they are each tales of wonder” (44). He adds that this is an argument for analysing fantasy ‘in addition to and alongside’ science fiction (198). It is precisely the element of ‘wonder’, the ‘non-realistic’…
Lara Hedberg | What happens when you find out that not only have you been dating an alien, but that you are now part-human, part-alien? Malinda Lo’s Adaptation (2012), the first in a two novel series, deals with the highs and lows of being a teenager who has been unknowingly implanted with alien DNA. The…
Rebecca Hutton, Alyson Miller, Elizabeth Braithwaite | Technology, the environment, and the young adult figure often exist in an uneasy yet inextricable relationship in many young adult fictions dealing with dystopian futures. Nature and the artificial are frequently constructed as binaries that the young person must negotiate or resist in order to survive and preserve…
Roslyn Weaver | Although science fiction is maligned in some quarters as escapism, two recent, popular young adult dystopian series offer themes that parallel realities of contemporary teenage life, primarily around identity in a world where internet and social media have dissolved the boundaries between private and public spheres. The following discussion focuses on these…
Rebecca Hutton , Deakin University | ‘The purpose of a thought-experiment, as the term was used by Schrödinger and other physicists, is not to predict the future […] but to describe reality, the present world.’ — Ursula K. Le Guin[i] Science fiction, according to Pearson, Hollinger and Gordon’s Queer universes: sexualities in science fiction,…
Marleen S. Barr, City University of New York | Professor Sondra Lear, the protagonist of my novels Oy Pioneer! (2003) and Oy Feminist Science Fiction (in press) – and some of my short fiction – appears in this story. I trot out Sondra whenever I imagine coping with reality in terms of science fictional premises.…
Carl Abbott, School of Urban Studies and Planning, Portland State University, USA | Nothing says trouble like a city smashed to smithereens on screen. Meteors and earthquakes, tsunamis and glaciers, earthly monsters and alien invaders – moviegoers might think that the only thing science fiction does with cities is demolish them with big budget special…