Sci-Fi

Critical science fiction, on its most basic level, is an opportunity to experiment with new ways of existing in the world; imaging different, economic, political and social structures. Within its pages, science fiction holds the space to test ambitious projects without the fear of failure. Reading and writing science fiction is, in all its imaginative and disruptive potential, something which I believe is valuable to anyone living under conditions which they wish to change.

‘Reworlding’ is the name given to a concerted effort to reimagine the places and spaces we inhabit, by generating a multiplicity of futures with which to affect the present positively. Reworlding takes the notion of worldbuilding beyond any ostensible purpose as art or entertainment and deploys aspects of it as a radical tool to instigate change in the world.

The stories compiled in this book were the outcome of a writing workshop series led by Callum Copley in a town called Birzeit, a few miles north of Ramallah, Palestine. From alien experiments, to fortune-tellers and telepathic conspiracies; the stories compiled here represent visions of the West Bank and beyond, reworlding both the local and the interplanetary. Although the contributions in the collection vary in form, length and style, all join a rapidly growing but comparatively small niche of Palestinian science fiction.

A young woman harnesses the power of a viral mutation and challenges the ruthless man who controls her.

For 4,000 years, an immortal has spread the seeds of a master race, using the downtrodden as his private breeding stock. But now a young ghetto telepath has found a way to awaken—and rule—her superhuman kind, igniting a psychic battle as she challenges her creator for her right to free her people.

Octavia E. Butler was an American science fiction writer, one of the best-known among the few African-American women in the field. She won both Hugo and Nebula awards. In 1995, she became the first science fiction writer to receive the MacArthur Foundation "Genius" Grant.

Published 1994. 

Naomi Mitchison, daughter of a distinguished scientist, sister of geneticist J B S Haldane, was always interested in the sciences, especially genetics. Her novels did not tend to demonstrate this, and she did not publish a Science Fiction novel until almost forty years into her fiction-writing career.

Isobel Murray's introduction here argues that it is by no means 'pure' Science Fiction: the success of the novel depends not only on the extraordinarily variety of life forms its heroine encounters and attempts to communicate with on different worlds: she is also a very credible human, or Terran, with recognisibly human emotions and a dramatic emotional life. This novel works effectively for readers who usually eschew the genre and prefer more traditional narratives.

Explorers like Mary are an elite class who consider curiosity to be Terrans' supreme gift, and in the novel she more than once takes risks that may destroy her life. Her voice, as she records her adventures and experiments, is individual, attractive and memorable.

In the second volume of the Native Tongue trilogy, the time has come for Láadan—the secret language created to resist an oppressive patriarchy—to empower womankind worldwide. To expand the language’s reach, female linguists translate the Bible into Láadan, and a group of Roman Catholic nuns are tasked to spread the language. But when outraged priests detect their sabotage, they send a double agent to infiltrate and destroy the movement from the inside.

With a foreword by Rebecca Romney

Suzette Haden Elgin (born Patricia Anne Wilkins; 1936–2015) was an American science fiction author. She founded the Science Fiction Poetry Association, and was considered an important figure in the field of science fiction constructed languages. Elgin was also a linguist; she published non-fiction, of which the best-known is the Gentle Art of Verbal Self-Defense series.

The final book in the Native Tongue Trilogy.

The interstellar Consortium of Planets has forsaken the irredeemably violent Earth, condemning the planet to economic and ecological chaos. As the Consortium prepares to euthanize the planet, women freedom fighters are offered one last chance to correct men’s brutal nature and stop the planet’s annihilation. In the stunning conclusion to the Native Tongue trilogy, female linguists must once again come forward to ensure the survival of humanity.

Suzette Haden Elgin (born Patricia Anne Wilkins; 1936–2015) was an American science fiction author. She founded the Science Fiction Poetry Association, and was considered an important figure in the field of science fiction constructed languages. Elgin was also a linguist; she published non-fiction, of which the best-known is the Gentle Art of Verbal Self-Defense series.

Published in 1666, The Blazing World stands as one of the first Western works of Science Fiction. In its assertion that all animal flesh is made of rational matter (including that of the female body) Margaret Cavendish wrote the only 17th century text of its kind - a book of gendered natural philosophy.

Caught in frost at the North Pole, Cavendish tells the story of a woman who is saved by crossing over from our world, to a whole new Utopia. Amongst gems and stars she finds a city of half-human half-beast scientists. Worm- Men, Bear-Men, Bird-Men and Fish-Men welcome her to their land. Together they toil in their investigations, describing Nature afresh.

Cavendish predicted motors, submarines and nautical machinery long before these technologies came to exist in the present. As more than just a work of fantastical invention, The Blazing World is important for its portrayal of invention itself. Enlightenment technology is described here as a recourse to protect the world. All of it. The feeling and reasoning matter of all animals, minerals, trees and plants is significant for its proto-environmentalism and for its path-setting form: philosophy as poetry; science as poetry.

With a foreword by Emile Frankel.

In The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction, visionary author Ursula K. Le Guin tells the story of human origin by redefining technology as a cultural carrier bag rather than a weapon of domination.

Hacking the linear, progressive mode of the Techno-Heroic, the Carrier Bag Theory of human evolution proposes: ‘before the tool that forces energy outward, we made the tool that brings energy home.’ Prior to the preeminence of sticks, swords and the Hero’s killing tools, our ancestors’ greatest invention was the container: the basket of wild oats, the medicine bundle, the net made of your own hair, the home, the shrine, the place that contains whatever is sacred. The recipient, the holder, the story. The bag of stars. 

This influential essay opens a portal to terra ignota, where the possibilities of human experience and knowledge can be discovered anew. 

Based on the author's experiences of living as an American in Iran, Kristen Alvanson's XYZT is a wildly imaginative dramatization of the idea of a "dialogue of civilizations" and its potentially outlandish ramifications. As part of an advanced technological test program, volunteers are shuttled back and forth between the US and Iran, hidden from the watchful eyes of immigration police and state bureaucracies. Each is given a single opportunity to be received by a local host and to have a brief authentic experience of what it means to live as “them” before being transported back home.

But far from heralding the bliss of mutual recognition, the experiment unleashes a series of displacements so disorienting that the fabric of reality begins to fray. Ordinary people become entangled in extraordinary situations, and everyday life bleeds into mythological encounters, alternate universes and dark psychedelic journeys in alien lands where the real and the imaginary are indistinguishable.

A treasury of tales told from multiple perspectives and in a multiplicity of styles, XYZT is an audacious cross-genre experiment, a firsthand memoir of what it means to see what "they" see, and a science-fictional, nonstandard engagement with anthropology in which cross-cultural encounters take on all the unpredictable features of a contemporary fairy tale.

Originally published in 1984, this classic dystopian trilogy is a testament to the power of language and women's collective action. 

In 2205, the Nineteenth Amendment has long been repealed and women are only valued for their utility. The Earth's economy depends on an insular group of linguists who "breed" women to be perfect interstellar translators until they are sent to the Barren House to await death. But instead, these women are slowly creating a language of their own to make resistance possible. Ignorant to this brewing revolution, Nazareth, a brilliant linguist, and Michaela, a servant, both seek emancipation in their own ways. But their personal rebellions risk exposing the secret language, and threaten the possibility of freedom for all.

In a story as exciting as any science fiction adventure written, Samuel R. Delany's 1976 SF novel, originally published as Triton, takes us on a tour of a utopian society at war with our own Earth. High wit in this future comedy of manners allows Delany to question gender roles and sexual expectations at a level that, 20 years after it was written, still make it a coruscating portrait of "the happily reasonable man", Bron Helstrom - an immigrant to the embattled world of Triton, whose troubles become more and more complex, till there is nothing left for him to do but become a woman.

Against a background of high adventure, this minuet of a novel dances from the farthest limits of the solar system to Earth's own Outer Mongolia. Alternately funny and moving, it is a wide-ranging tale in which character after character turns out not to be what he - or she - seems.

Sad Sack is a book of collected writing by Sophia Al-Maria, taking feminist inspiration from Ursula K. Le Guin’s 1986 essay ‘The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction’; opposing ‘the linear, progressive, Time’s-(killing)-arrow mode of the Techno-Heroic.’ Encompassing more than a decade of work, Sad Sack tracks Al-Maria’s speculative journey as a writer, from the first seed of her ‘premature’ memoir, through the coining and subsequent critique of ‘Gulf Futurism’, towards experiments in gathering, containing, welling up and sucking dry.

For me this book is a bag... Like any single-use carrier bag – I disapprove. It shouldn’t exist, it contributes to pollution, it should be banned... And yet, in spite of the fact I know this book may be a waste product... I’m still writing, redacting, expanding... I’m still waiting, wasting, wanting. According to Ursula, ‘It is a human thing to do to put something you want, because it’s useful, edible, or beautiful, into a bag.' – Sophia Al-Maria

Metabolize, If Able is a queer correspondence sent from a dystopian future. ​Clay AD’s hybrid-novel​ follow​s​ the lives of clones​ and their spawn through ​medical charts, IMs, self-help meditations, screenplays, and, of course, epistles. ​For the clones, a ​corporation​ controls life and death, sickness and wealth. Corp doctors, or DRs, bring the clones to life and assign them work. But DRs restrict clone reproduction. They pathologize and withhold care. They keep the clones sick. What happens when the clones and their anti-Corp cell turn illness into a weapon? AD’s ​sci-fi world posits the hope found in collective intimacy & the struggle against state control.

Une exploratrice terrienne découvre OMAOOG-deemw, une planète d’un autre système solaire. Elle se confronte à la civilisation MNRVWX, et apprend à connaître ce peuple non-binaire qui communique par ondes.

Ce roman composé de textes indépendants explore les possibilités de vie alternatives par le biais de la science fiction, tant au niveau du genre que du point de vue d'autre formes d'échanges entre "humains" et entre espèces.

Chaque texte a donné lieu à une performance, ou incursion dans le réel, au fil de l'année que j'ai passée à les écrire.

Beyond The Fields We Know. With contribtions by Joe Campbell & Oscar Oldershaw, Rebecca Bligh, Natalie Chin, Francis Patrick Brady, Llew Watkins, Jim Colquhoun, James W. Hedges, Nick Carr, Humphrey Astley, Ian Hatcher, Brian Moran, Heli Clarke, Holly White, Holly Childs, Jenny Simmar, Esteban Ottaso, Daisy Lafarge, Quentin S. Crisp, Daniel Keller & Ella Plevin, Isabella Martin, Thogdin Ripley, Julia Tcharfas, Paul Purgas, Matthew Higgins, Caroline Derveaux, Lillian Wilkie. Published July 2015

Sinister Wisdom 34: Sci-Fi, Fantasy & Lesbian Visions creates worlds with wild imaginings of past present and future as we'd want it: from forms of government to forms of sex. When we name what we want, we create the road towards it. This issue infuses our present with all manner of fabulous images in order to challenge our habits of thought.

Creative Work By

Judith Katz
Tara Danaan
Beth Povinelli
Sarah Lucia Hoagland
Anna Livia
Laura Hershey
Nicky Morris
Marjory Nelson
Sawnie Morris
zana
Catalina Ríos
Donna Allegra
Christian McEwen
Sheila Ortiz Taylor
Bernice Mennis
Michelle D. Williams

And More!