Details

Ethical Futures and Global Science Fiction

Studies in Global Science Fiction

von: Zachary Kendal, Aisling Smith, Giulia Champion, Andrew Milner
90,94 €
Verlag:	Palgrave Macmillan
Format:	PDF
Veröffentl.:	27.01.2020
ISBN/EAN:	9783030278939
Sprache:	englisch

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Beschreibungen

Titelbeschreibung

Ethical Futures and Global Science Fiction explores the ethical concerns and dimensions of representations of the future of global science fiction, focusing on the issues that dominate utopian, dystopian and science fiction literature. The essays examine recent visions of the future in science fiction and re-examine earlier texts through contemporary lenses. Across fourteen chapters, the collection considers authors from Algeria, Australia, Canada, China, Egypt, France, Germany, Haiti, India, Jamaica, Macedonia, Mexico, Russia, South Africa, the UK and USA. The volume delves into a range of ethical questions of immediate contemporary relevance, including environmental ethics, postcolonial ethics, social justice, animal ethics and the ethics of alterity.

Inhaltsverzeichnis

1. Science Fiction’s Ethical Modes: Totality and Infinity in Isaac Asimov’s Foundation Trilogy and Yevgeny Zamyatin’s Мы (We), Zachary Kendal.- 2. Inversion and Prolepsis: Begum Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain’s Feminist Utopian Strategies, Sreejata Paul.- 3. Better Societies for the Ethical Treatment of Animals: Vegetarianism and the Utopian Tradition, Joshua Bulleid.- 4. Eutopia, Dystopia and Climate Change, Andrew Milner.- 5. Evolving a New, Ecological Posthumanism: An Ecocritical Comparison of Michel Houellebecq’s Les Particules élémentaires and Margaret Atwood’s MaddAddam Trilogy, Rachel Fetherston.- 6. The Perverse Utopianism of Willed Human Extinction: Writing Extinction in Liu Cixin’s The Three-Body Problem (三体), Thomas Moran.- 7. Ecopocalyptic Visions in Haitian and Mexican Landscapes of Exploitation, Giulia Champion.- 8. Postcolonial Science Fiction and the Ethics of Empire, Bill Ashcroft.- 9. The Postcolonial Cyborg in Amitav Ghosh’s The Calcutta Chromosome, Nudrat Kamal.- 10. Wagering the Future: Split Collectives and Decolonial Praxis in Assia Djebar’s Ombre Sultane and Nalo Hopkinson’s Midnight Robber, Lara Choksey.- 11. Rewriting France’s Future: From Louis-Sébastien Mercier’s Pre-Revolutionary Projections to Michel Houellebecq’s Islamic Agendas via Secular State Ethics, Jacqueline Dutton.- 12. The Appearance of Dystopian Fiction in Macedonia and its Ethical Concerns, Kalina Maleska.- 13. Cairo in 2015 and in 2023: The Dreadful Fates of the Egyptian Capital in Jamil Nasir’s Tower of Dreams and Ahmed Khaled Towfik’s Utopia, Anna Madoeuf & Delphine Pagès-El Karoui.- 14. Post-Capitalist Futures: A Report on Imagination, Nick Lawrence.<div> </div>

Autorenportrait

<div>Zachary Kendal is a librarian in Rare Books at Monash University Library, Australia. He was recently an editor-in-chief of Colloquy: Text, Theory, Critique and is completing a PhD in Literary and Cultural Studies at Monash University, researching ethics and literary representation in science fiction.

Aisling Smith is a teaching associate in literary studies at Monash University and Deakin University, Australia. Her PhD examined affect theory and the works of David Foster Wallace. She is also a creative writer, former editor-in-chief of Colloquy: Text, Theory, Critique and an editor of the Verge: Chimera (2017) anthology.

Giulia Champion is completing her doctoral thesis at the University of Warwick, UK. Her research investigates postcolonial literature in original languages and aims to theorise literary cannibalism as a set of practices through the world ecology framework and historical materialism. 

Andrew Milner is Emeritus Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Monash University, Australia, and Honorary Professor at University of Warwick, UK. He is the author of numerous books including, most recently, Locating Science Fiction (2012), Again, Dangerous Visions: Essays in Cultural Materialism (2018) and, with J. R. Burgmann, Science Fiction and Climate Change (in press). </div>

Back cover copy

Ethical Futures and Global Science Fiction explores the ethical concerns and dimensions of representations of the future of global science fiction, focusing on the issues that dominate utopian, dystopian, and science fiction literature. The essays examine recent visions of the future in science fiction and re-examine earlier texts through contemporary lenses. Across fourteen chapters, the collection considers authors from Algeria, Australia, Canada, China, Egypt, France, Germany, Haiti, India, Jamaica, Macedonia, Mexico, Russia, South Africa, the UK and USA. The volume delves into a range of ethical questions of immediate contemporary relevance, including environmental ethics, postcolonial ethics, social justice, animal ethics and the ethics of alterity.

Sonderbeitrag

Creates a vision for the future of science fiction studies Highlights non-Anglophone literatures Considers key ethical questions relevant to a broad range of interdisciplinary fields such as ecocriticism, postcolonial studies, philosophy and bioethics, etc.

Unpublished endorsement

“A brilliantly curated, critically-rigorous, and discerning book. It stands apart among even the best of the emerging canon of global sf studies in the range of national literatures, historical periods, and subject areas covered, and in the reach and depth of its transdisciplinary approach. This is a collection to which students and scholars in the field will return again and again.”—Terry Harpold, Associate Professor, University of Florida, USA

 

"This volume makes an important contribution to the theoretical debates on the question of ethics for a sustainable future. Contributors investigate global science fiction literature, explore alterity and climate change and analyse the political dimensions of utopian and dystopian narratives in different geographical and cultural contexts. It is a valuable collection for both established and new scholars from different disciplines, providing original and up to date interdisciplinary perspectives on the intrinsically global qualities of science fiction."—Raffaella Baccolini, Professor of English Literature at the University of Bologna, Italy, and co-author of Utopia Method Vision (2007) and Dark Horizons: Science Fiction and the Dystopian Imagination (2003)

 

"This book makes a valuable contribution to our understanding of how science fiction responds to contemporary ethical and political dilemmas. Four well-chosen sections frame insights into SF narratives on encounters with the other, environmental ethics, post-colonial challenges and socio-political inequality. These concerns speak directly to the felt problems of the present moment. At the same time, the collection is rooted in a rich understanding of SF’s long history of engagement with social, political and ethical issues.  The global and especially postcolonial focus of this collection is a particularly welcome to SF criticism which has only recently turned to fully address the US and Eurocentric history of the genre and its histories. We need to listen much more closely to indigenous and postcolonial stories and theories in the face of Western modernity’s impasses. Ethical Futures and Global Science Fiction puts these issues and positions into a complex and subtle conversation with reflections on the spectre of climate crisis and the persistence of global capitalism and its inequities. The collection reiterates the importance of speculative fiction to necessary thinking about probable, possible and desirable futures, and brings important new texts and voices to our attention."  

 —Lisa Garforth, Senior Lecturer in Sociology at Newcastle University, UK, and author of Green Utopias: Environmental Hope Before and After Nature (2017)