Anne Cranny-Francis, UTS | This paper locates many of the features of science fiction that make it such a pleasure to read, watch, and be part of, and at the same time maps the way that science fiction entered the critical and theoretical landscape. I’m going to do this also as a personal journey as…
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…
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…
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…
Elizabeth Lundberg | Surveying feminist science fiction (SF) theory of the past decade-or-so, I am struck by work that falls into three broadly sketched and interrelated categories, all engaged with questions of genre itself. The first category encompasses recovery and expansion projects: theorists like Justine Larbalestier and Lisa Yaszek have been working to dismantle any…
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…
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;…
Sheila Finch | Lacking something new to read when the day for my semi-monthly writers’ workshop approached, I dashed off a brief essay about Ray Bradbury speaking at a recent Eaton Conference. I had no plans to do anything with it beyond maybe putting it up on my LiveJournal blog, but one of my workshop…
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…
Deletion is proud to present Episode 4 The New! The Now! The Fantastic!: Artistic and Scholarly Innovation, specially helmed by Marleen S. Barr, noted for her foundational work in feminist science fiction criticism. This episode has a particular thematic focus on women’s creative practice intersecting with the science fictional, the authorial and the scholarly. —…