Episode 9: Deletion|Deviation

Deletion’s two-day symposium, Deletion/Deviation, presented a constellation of new perspectives on contemporary science fiction and its many perversions. As organizer Dr. Grady Hancock wrote in her introduction to the conference programme, Science Fiction exists in a state of tension between the pleasurable and the perverse — of the pleasure gained from its fictive forms, and…

Notes on 2001: A Space Odyssey

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…

Character Degree Zero: Space and Posthuman Subject

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…

That Old Black Magic: Women, Race, and Post-Millennial U.S. Science Fiction Television

Elyce Helford | Though the present and future of post-millennial American science fiction television varies greatly from program to program, all are arguably driven by a melting-pot white ethic that reveals gains for white women and far less for people of color, especially African American women. While programming remains overwhelmingly produced by white men, white…

Science-Fictional North Korea: A Defective History

Seo-Young Chu | Kafkaesque, Orwellian, eerie, surreal, bizarre, grotesque, alien, wacky, fascinating, dystopian, illusive, theatrical, antic, haunting, apocalyptic: these are just a few of the vaguely science-fictional adjectives that are now associated with North Korea. At the same time, North Korea has become an oddly convenient trope for a certain aesthetic – an uncanny opacity;…

The Intervention

Sue Lange | Five minutes later I stepped off the Chicago to Wyoming line into the stench of Dubuque’s suburbs. Place called Gurwood. I hadn’t had enough time to review the particulars so I inserted the stick into my Slot A and uploaded the info the old-fashioned way: straight to the brain. I perused as…