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…
Angela Ndalianis | Over the last few decades, special effects and technological creations generated in the name of entertainment have given rise to a ‘science-fictionality’ that brings the technologies that have been imaged and imagined by science fiction films closer to our everyday reality. Above all, it is the robot and cyborg – the former…
Horst Sarubin | When asked to write about ‘the drowning man’ for the inaugural episode of Deletion, I immediately started to formulate my intellectual response. My mind went back to the key ideas from the thesis in which it originated. Phrases such as “Liquid Modernity” and “Expanded Cinema” began to trickle back into my consciousness. …
Matt Hills | Pleasures taken in any aesthetic object are a slippery and awkward thing to grasp, let alone theorise. In my book The Pleasures of Horror (2005), I argued that enjoyment taken in genre fiction only becomes accessible to others – including theorists – as a result of being placed into discourse. As a…
Sherryl Vint, University of California, Riverside | Scholarship on science fiction (sf) has long privileged print as the medium best suited to convey what is conventionally regarded as the genre’s key quality, the effect of cognitive estrangement. A term coined by Darko Suvin in his extremely influential Metamorphoses of Science Fiction, cognitive estrangement describes a…
Mark Bould | One of the least pleasurable things about writing about sf is that non-specialist editors and publishers always want you to begin with a definition. Nowadays, after a few minutes of this kind of thing, I respond by instead discussing the irresolvable fluidity of genres as discursive objects produced by ongoing processes of…
Christy Dena | This creative response began as a completely different story and form. What excited me in the end was the concept of deletion and how it could be an interesting mechanic: where the only thing you can do in the world is delete. I thought about deleting parts of robots to make them better. Healing…
In cultural terms, we are experiencing an age of deletion: files expunged, identities stolen and wiped, terrorists and undesirables locked away in ‘no place’ detention centres with no records kept of who or where they are. Science fiction in all its forms recognises this dematerialisation of records through paranoid and conspiratorial narratives in which people…