Speculative Fiction Research Papers - Academia.edu

Speculative Fiction Research Papers - Academia.edu
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Speculative fiction is a broad literary genre that encompasses narratives exploring imaginative and futuristic concepts, including science fiction, fantasy, horror, and utopian/dystopian themes. It often examines the implications of alternative realities, societal structures, and human experiences beyond the constraints of the real world.
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About this topic
Speculative fiction is a broad literary genre that encompasses narratives exploring imaginative and futuristic concepts, including science fiction, fantasy, horror, and utopian/dystopian themes. It often examines the implications of alternative realities, societal structures, and human experiences beyond the constraints of the real world.
Key research themes
1. How does speculative fiction function as a tool for imagining and critically engaging with future sociotechnical realities?
This research theme focuses on speculative fiction's role in shaping, reflecting, and critiquing visions of possible futures, especially those influenced by technological and scientific developments. Speculative fiction is studied not merely as entertainment but as a method for creative ideation, ethical reflection, and public engagement with emerging technologies and socio-environmental challenges. It examines how narratives and imaginative frameworks contribute to understanding and negotiating technoscientific and societal change.
Design Ideation Through Speculative Fiction: Foundational Principles and Exploratory Study
by
maulik kotecha
2023, Journal of Mechanical Design
Key finding: This study provides empirical and conceptual evidence that excerpts from speculative fiction can stimulate engineering design ideation by triggering both focused idea generation (when stimuli are closely related to the design...
Key finding: This study provides empirical and conceptual evidence that excerpts from speculative fiction can stimulate engineering design ideation by triggering both focused idea generation (when stimuli are closely related to the design problem) and out-of-the-box thinking (when stimuli are less related). By prototyping a workflow offering science fiction excerpts as textual stimuli, it operationalizes speculative fiction as a concrete framework for sociotechnical design, establishing its potential to inspire new concepts and novel interactions in fields like human-computer interaction and robotics.
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Reading Science: SF and the Uses of Literature
by
Amy C . Chambers
2025, The Palgrave Handbook of Twentieth and Twenty-First Century Literature and Science
Key finding: This chapter theorizes SF as a critical site where publics actively engage with scientific ideas and futures through narrative reading practices. The authors argue that SF offers symbolic and epistemic resources uniquely...
Key finding: This chapter theorizes SF as a critical site where publics actively engage with scientific ideas and futures through narrative reading practices. The authors argue that SF offers symbolic and epistemic resources uniquely capable of interrogating and critiquing technoscientific development, acting as a mode to co-construct imagined futures rather than merely reflecting scientific knowledge. They emphasize the importance of studying reading as a social act, thereby foregrounding reader agency in the navigation of science-fictional worlds and their social implications.
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Science Fiction and Bioethics
by
Ari Schick
2025, The Edinburgh Companion to Science Fiction and the Medical Humanities
Key finding: This chapter reveals the historically intertwined yet marginalized relationship between science fiction and bioethics, arguing that bioethics has often overlooked the potential of SF as an anticipatory ethical resource. By...
Key finding: This chapter reveals the historically intertwined yet marginalized relationship between science fiction and bioethics, arguing that bioethics has often overlooked the potential of SF as an anticipatory ethical resource. By analyzing how SF frames imagined technological futures and biopolitical discourses, the work proposes that integrating SF within bioethical reflection enriches responses to emerging biotechnologies, sharpening ethical sensibilities and improving critical engagement with technoscientific narratives shaping contemporary society.
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Sci-Fi
by
Giovanni Maria Troiano
2022, Proceedings of the 9th Nordic Conference on Human-Computer Interaction
Key finding: This paper documents the symbiotic relationship between science fiction and information law scholarship, demonstrating how both domains speculate on technological evolution and its societal impact. It highlights sci-fi’s...
Key finding: This paper documents the symbiotic relationship between science fiction and information law scholarship, demonstrating how both domains speculate on technological evolution and its societal impact. It highlights sci-fi’s influence on legal discourse, shaping frameworks around AI, robotics, privacy, and rights, and conversely, the role of law as a narrative element in sci-fi literature. The work shows that sci-fi not only anticipates technological futures but also serves as a heuristic tool for policymakers and scholars wrestling with emergent legal and ethical challenges.
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2. In what ways does speculative fiction mediate concepts of identity, social justice, and cultural memory through its narrative and artistic strategies?
This theme explores how speculative fiction and related artistic forms interrogate and reconstruct categories of identity, memory, and social structures under conditions of marginalization, oppression, and postcolonial critique. It assesses how speculative narratives serve as strategies of resistance, reclamation, and imagination, blending science fiction, fantasy, and experimental media to reframe histories and futures of underrepresented groups. This includes considerations of posthumanism, trans identities, memory activism, and postcolonial literatures, focusing on the plastic, mutable qualities of speculative modes to foster agency and decolonial perspectives.
Memory Activism. Plasticity of Digital Sculptures
by
Ursula Ströbele
2025, The Philosophical Kitchen, Plasticity, ed. Alice Iacobone
Key finding: Through case studies of digital and 3D printed sculptures, this paper elucidates how speculative digital art serves as a form of memory activism enabling symbolic repatriation and aesthetic resistance to histories of...
Key finding: Through case studies of digital and 3D printed sculptures, this paper elucidates how speculative digital art serves as a form of memory activism enabling symbolic repatriation and aesthetic resistance to histories of colonialism and destruction. By articulating an extended notion of plasticity encompassing both digital code and haptic experience, the study demonstrates how technological and sculptural practices generate mutable, speculative memories that engage viewers in ethical remapping of cultural heritage, foregrounding the dynamic interplay of form, memory, and politics.
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Rokeya’s Dream: Speculative Writing and the Making of an Unreal Education
by
Remy Y . S . Low
2025, Hope, wisdom and courage: teaching and learning practices in today’s schools and beyond
Key finding: By examining the life and work of Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain, this essay argues that speculative writing acts as a radical contemplative practice enabling marginalized subjects to envision alternative social realities and...
Key finding: By examining the life and work of Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain, this essay argues that speculative writing acts as a radical contemplative practice enabling marginalized subjects to envision alternative social realities and sustain hope under oppressive conditions. It highlights speculative texts’ capacity to disrupt experienced chronic stress through imaginative extrapolation, thereby fostering resilience and motivating social transformation in contexts marked by gender injustice and educational inequities.
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3. How does speculative fiction reflect and critique technological determinism and sociopolitical transformations across diverse cultural and historical contexts?
This theme investigates speculative fiction’s engagement with theories of technological determinism, human evolution, posthumanism, and geopolitical dynamics within both Anglophone and non-Anglophone contexts. It includes analyses of canonical works addressing singularity and posthuman futures, cultural appropriations of science fiction tropes in Japanese mecha narratives, and explorations of ecological imaginaries and infrastructure projects as metaphors for modernity’s challenges. The focus is on speculative fiction’s role in articulating and interrogating power, race, technology, and environmental crisis.
Technological Determinism and Singularity in Clarke & Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey
by
Cenk TAN
2025, Selçuk University Journal of Faculty of Letters
Key finding: This article explicates how the novel and film '2001: A Space Odyssey' embody technological determinism leading to a singularity and a posthuman future. It advances the interpretation that despite articulating warnings...
Key finding: This article explicates how the novel and film '2001: A Space Odyssey' embody technological determinism leading to a singularity and a posthuman future. It advances the interpretation that despite articulating warnings regarding technological perils, Clarke and Kubrick foresee and endorse the inevitable emergence of posthuman existence. The work situates these themes within ongoing philosophical debates about normative innovation, technocracy, and human evolution, making the case for the relevance of 2001 to contemporary discourses on AI and biotechnology.
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Earthlings, spacenoids, and "newtypes" in Gundam's Universal Century: Racial contracts beyond Anglophone militarized space opera
by
Eamon Reid
2025, 2nd Annual Edge Hill PGR Palooza
Key finding: Applying Charles Mills’ concept of racial contract to Japanese mecha science fiction, this study identifies and analyzes the constructions of 'earthlings', 'spacenoids', and 'newtypes' as manifestations of racialized...
Key finding: Applying Charles Mills’ concept of racial contract to Japanese mecha science fiction, this study identifies and analyzes the constructions of 'earthlings', 'spacenoids', and 'newtypes' as manifestations of racialized categorization and ideological conflict within the Gundam Universal Century narrative. The paper argues that Gundam’s fictional world expresses racial contracts that transcend Eurocentric dialectics, demonstrating the adaptability of racial contract theory to non-Anglophone speculative universes and enriching understandings of race, identity, and political liberalism in science fiction.
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Speculative Islands: Black Sand, White Dolphins, and a New 'Ecological Island' in the South China Sea
by
Benjamin K Hodges
2025, Folk, Knowledge, Place
Key finding: This article uses the planned construction of a speculative ecological island in Macao, built on reclamation of construction waste, as a case to explore ecological and infrastructural imaginaries through the lenses of...
Key finding: This article uses the planned construction of a speculative ecological island in Macao, built on reclamation of construction waste, as a case to explore ecological and infrastructural imaginaries through the lenses of environmental affect and archipelagic theory. It critiques the spatial politics and postcolonial histories embedded in island-making and land reclamation, demonstrating how speculative projects materialize and contest narratives of development, consumption, and environmental care within globalized urban contexts.
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Related Topics
Science Fiction and Fantasy
Speculative Literature
Science Fiction Studies
Fantasy Literature
Speculative Realism
Utopia and Science Fiction
Dystopian Literature
Weird Fiction
Critical Theory
Speculative Philosophy
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Niger Delta Literature as Echoes of Grand Dystopian
by
Ebimobode Alexander Amabebe
2026, Aksu Journal of English
This paper aims to explore how Niger Delta literature points to oil companies as the real villains in their stories. This representation follows the tenets of postcolonial ecocriticism and a self-designed model, which offers a simple...
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This paper aims to explore how Niger Delta literature points to oil companies as the real villains in their stories. This representation follows the tenets of postcolonial ecocriticism and a self-designed model, which offers a simple exploration of the acts of villainy of the oil companies in the texts and exposes the fact that these companies never lose or suffer any consequences. The paper adopts a descriptive and analytical methodology with the selected Niger Delta literary texts as the primary sources of data. This paper explores multinational oil companies as grand villains in selected Niger Delta literary texts. The paper reveals that popular texts in the region recreate the acts of villainy that these companies carry out in the region. It also reveals that the oil companies are immune to defeat and consequence. Thus, it recommends that Niger Delta text scholars/authors fully embrace the dystopian and speculative genre to reach a wider audience. It also recommends that comparative studies of the global south suppression by corporations should be incorporated in African literary research. The paper concludes that Niger Delta literary texts represent the oil companies as the neo-colonial and economic forces that are directly responsible for the condition of the region through a form of the dystopian genre.
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Utopias and science fictions in educational theory and philosophy: Introduction to the special issue
by
Alison M . Brady, PhD
2026, Research in Education
In this introduction to the special issue on "Utopias and Science Fictions in Education Theory and Philosophy", we explore the points of departure that brought these contributions together, including our Summer School in the coastal town...
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In this introduction to the special issue on "Utopias and Science Fictions in Education Theory and Philosophy", we explore the points of departure that brought these contributions together, including our Summer School in the coastal town of Gdynia (generously supported by PESGB and the European Solidarity Centre in Gdansk) where participants were given the opportunity to enact in real time utopian and speculative modes of thinking and writing on the present state of education. The Summer School was a culmination of several years of thinking together about the role, the actuality, or indeed the (im)possibility of utopias and science fictions in theorising about education, which we briefly summarise in the text. This special issue showcases how science fiction and educational theory, when placed in dialogue, can reanimate the utopian dimension of education. By experimenting with axioms, reassembling everyday utopias, and engaging in speculative fabulation, the essays collected here suggest that utopia remains vital for charting the horizons of educational thought. Within these horizons, utopian thought may no longer appear as the grand projection of modernity but persist as practices and forms of thinking and theory production, offering, just like science fiction, a mode of imagination and a way of inhabiting the present otherwise. To affirm this is not to indulge in mere fantasy, but to recognize that education itself consists in and educational theory could become an invitation to think beyond what is.
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It [Did] Happen Here: Fascism and Totalitarianism in Anglo-American Alternate History Fiction
by
Christophe Den Tandt
2026
This paper investigates the cultural work accomplished by several novels of contemporary alternate history fiction in their representation of a post-WWII fascist present. The corpus for this analysis includes Philip K. Dick’s The Man in...
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This paper investigates the cultural work accomplished by several novels of contemporary alternate history fiction in their representation of a post-WWII fascist present. The corpus for this analysis includes Philip K. Dick’s The Man in the High Castle (1962), Robert Harris’s Fatherland (1992), Harry Turtledove’s The Great War (1998-2000) and American Empire (2001-2003), Christopher Priest’s The Separation (2002), and Philip Roth’s The Plot Against America (2004).
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DECONSTRUCTING THE AMERICAN DREAM IN THE CHINESE-AMERICAN NARRATIVE OF REBECCA F. KUANG'S NOVELS
by
Rifqi Akbar
2026, Rubikon: Journal of Transnational American Studies
The American Dream as the axis of diaspora pathways has an impact on the construction of American diaspora novels, especially the perspective of Chinese-American female writers, one of whom is RF Kuang. This study focuses on RF Kuang's...
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The American Dream as the axis of diaspora pathways has an impact on the construction of American diaspora novels, especially the perspective of Chinese-American female writers, one of whom is RF Kuang. This study focuses on RF Kuang's reflection in representing the American Dream. For the American diaspora, this dream still marginalizes the existence of minorities and is exclusive to white people. Diaspora writers always conflict with ambivalent values that must intersect with the American Dream so that this racism can be dissolved in American society and achieve equality. Through Derrida, American diaspora writers are given a third space to implement the American dream and ideological contestation that provides a nuance of transnational solidarity. This dream is conveyed through Kuang’s novels Poppy War Trilogy: An Arcane of History: Babel; and Yellowface. This research indicates that each of Kuang’s works is constructed within the myth as the foreground, and it is negotiated through her achievements, exclusivity, and inclusivity in literary production, the equality in the characterization, and the Chinese Dream, which forms the contestation. These elements represent the Chinese-American narrative, as well as the existence of the Asian-American diaspora within the American publishing system, which significantly pulls in a global popularity among international audiences.
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Plasticene. Understanding Plastic Pervasiveness through Environmental Humanities
by
Alice Iacobone
2026
Academic Poster Session 2026, organized by HSG Sustainability Services
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Extractivism and Exhaustion through an Anthropofungal Speculative Perspective.
by
Ana Laura Cantera
2026, Ana Laura Cantera
The text is a speculative essay narrated from an imaginary sensory perspective of a fungal being. While as humans, we could never truly experience other forms of existence, the game of speculative writing allows us to rehearse...
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The text is a speculative essay
narrated from an imaginary sensory
perspective of a fungal being. While
as humans, we could never truly
experience other forms of existence,
the game of speculative writing allows
us to rehearse more-than-human
strategies of survival and resistance
in the face of the destructive logics of
capitalist greed. Through a humanly
fungal voice, the essay adopts the
mode of “as if” to explore how
multispecies narratives can unsettle
naturalized stories and imagine
other possible and desirable worlds.
The anthropofungal perspective is
a speculative interspecies branch
of the Brazilian anthropophagic
methodology to absorb and
metabolize the logic of the fungi, even
being humans
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The Meta-Linguistic and Analytic Magick Concepts in R. F. Kuang's Babel A Formal Thesis
by
Hector Haralambous
2026, The Meta-Linguistic and Analytic Magick Concepts in R. F. Kuang's Babel
This thesis examines the meta-linguistic, analytic, and quasi-neurolinguistic concepts embedded in R. F. Kuang's Babel: Or the Necessity of Violence: An Arcane History of the Oxford Translators' Revolution (2022). It argues that the...
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This thesis examines the meta-linguistic, analytic, and quasi-neurolinguistic concepts embedded in R. F. Kuang's Babel: Or the Necessity of Violence: An Arcane History of the Oxford Translators' Revolution (2022). It argues that the novel's silver-working system is not merely a fantasy mechanism but a speculative model of translation theory made material. In Babel, magical efficacy does not arise from simple verbal correspondence; rather, it emerges from the minute semantic differences between near-equivalent words in different languages. This thesis therefore proposes that Kuang constructs a form of analytic magick grounded in metalinguistic awareness, lexical comparison, and institutionalized multilingual labor. The study places the novel in dialogue with recent scholarship on translation, colonialism, and institutional power, while also drawing on broader work in bilingualism, metalinguistic awareness, and cross-language activation to illuminate why Kuang's conceit feels cognitively persuasive even while remaining fantastical.123 It further argues that the Royal Institute of Translation functions as an apparatus of imperial extraction that captures the semantic labor of multilingual subjects and embeds it into silver bars, logistics, warfare, and governance.45 In addition to close reading, this thesis incorporates scholarly evaluations and review essays on Babel in order to assess how critics have understood the novel's treatment of translation, oppression, and political didacticism.67 The final claim is that Babel should be read as a novel of meta-linguistic infrastructure: a fiction in which the knowledge of linguistic remainder becomes technological power, and in which translation itself becomes the decisive battleground between empire and resistance.
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The Impact of African Female Literary Authors on STEM Education and Gender Awareness
by
Louisa Lum
2026, Frontiers International Journal of Interdisciplinary Studies (FIJIS)
Globally, women comprise fewer than 30% of STEM researchers, with African nations experiencing exacerbated disparities stemming from cultural stereotypes, religious barriers, and resource constraints. Although real-world role models...
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Globally, women comprise fewer than 30% of STEM researchers, with African nations experiencing exacerbated disparities stemming from cultural stereotypes, religious barriers, and resource constraints. Although real-world role models enhance girls' STEM aspirations, the potential of African women's speculative fiction as a catalyst for gender equity is not sufficiently explored. This study examines the influence of Nnedi Okorafor's Lagoon and Namwali Serpell's The Old Drift on STEM perceptions and gender awareness among Cameroonian university students, framed by social role theory (for stereotype subversion) and the Longwe Empowerment Framework (for access, conscientisation, control). Thematic analysis of 80 excerpts identified 68 instances of female STEM agency across these dimensions. Four Focus Group Discussions (FGDs) (n=24 participants: two STEM and two Literature/Languages groups, with six females aged 18-25 per group) at the Universities of Buea and Douala used Longwe-aligned questions, following presession reading of excerpts. Thematic analysis revealed portrayals of Africancentred STEM that challenge gender norms. FGDs demonstrated strong resonance: 92% of Buea STEM students identified Adaora's resourcefulness as realistic; 83% of Douala Literature students recognised religious barriers from personal experience; 75% envisioned curriculum applications. Literature students emphasised advocacy roles; STEM students reported aspiration shifts. We concluded that African women's speculative fiction fosters STEM gender awareness through relatable narratives subverting stereotypes. Findings advocate embedding excerpts in higher education curricula across Cameroon's university contexts. Future longitudinal FGDs should track sustained behavioural impacts.
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Tourisms' Tristes Tropiques II: Cultural Landscapes
by
Carla M . Guerron Montero
2026, eTropic
In this second special issue on "Tourisms' Tristes Tropiques" we explore "Cultural Landscapes" socio-culturally and ecologically to show how they are intertwined with historical, colonial, and neocolonial aspects of tourism. The...
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In this second special issue on "Tourisms' Tristes Tropiques" we explore "Cultural Landscapes" socio-culturally and ecologically to show how they are intertwined with historical, colonial, and neocolonial aspects of tourism. The anthropology of tourism and critical tourism studies recognize tourism as both an industry and a cultural phenomenon, and this dual approach provides a lens for exploring how cultural landscapes are created, transformed, activated, and morphed by tourism. In this Introduction, we discuss how such studies have contributed to a nuanced and careful understanding of tourism's effects on cultural landscapes. The title of this special issue pays homage to Lévi-Strauss's Tristes Tropiques, a memoir that, in many ways, anticipated the subfields explored here. Although Tristes Tropiques remains a controversial text, on its publication in 1955, it presented an intrepid indictment of racism and colonialism, and of travellers whose very act of mobility contributes to both. In this second issue, we venture across a range of tropical landscapes, from South America and Northern Australia to the Seychelles and the Andaman Islands, through India, Southeast Asia, and finally to tropical Africa. The contributors examine how tourism shapes and is shaped by cultures, ecologies, heritage, and history. Their analyses reveal cultural landscapes that are not merely scenic backdrops but rich spaces that local people engage with to counter the touristic forces of commodification and inequality. This second part of the double special issue on "Tourisms' Tristes Tropiques" complements the analysis established in the first issue on the subtheme of "Literary Travels," and furthers that analytical journey.
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Rhetorical Devices and Symbolic Codes in Anna Smith Spark's Short Story Red Glass
by
Dr. Herbert W. Jardner
2026
This study examines the short story Red Glass by Anna Smith Spark within the context of Grimdark fantasy, analyzing its narrative strategies, stylistic features, and symbolic imagery to explore how literature reflects and interrogates...
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This study examines the short story Red Glass by Anna Smith Spark within the context of Grimdark fantasy, analyzing its narrative strategies, stylistic features, and symbolic imagery to explore how literature reflects and interrogates societal violence. The story employs a highly stylized, fragmented prose, internal focalization, and synesthetic language to simulate disorientation, trauma, and corporeal immediacy. Central to the narrative is the recurring symbol of the red glass, which mediates the protagonist Lidae’s perception of violence, mortality, and survival, functioning simultaneously as metaphor, perceptual filter, and locus of aesthetic and existential reflection. The study situates Red Glass in ongoing discourses on media, aggression, and morality, highlighting how Grimdark narratives articulate deep distrust toward simplistic progress or redemption narratives, expose the internal logic of violence, and mirror contemporary societal conflicts marked by moral ambiguity, structural repetition, and the fragility of institutional authority. By analyzing the rhetorical, aesthetic, and ethical dimensions of Smith Spark’s text, this paper demonstrates how Grimdark functions as both critique and reflection: it engages readers with the human consequences of violence, challenges conventional notions of heroism, and positions literature as a medium capable of linking individual experience with collective social realities.
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THE ROOT OF ENVIRONMENTAL AND HISTORICAL TRAUMA OF COLONIZATION IN LITERATURE
by
SIVARANJINI S
2026, NOVELTY
The goal of literary and environmental studies is to investigate both social commitments and methods. Following a similar path, eco-criticism begins with the belief that imagination and inquiry can strengthen, energize, and drive concern...
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The goal of literary and environmental studies is to investigate both social commitments and methods. Following a similar path, eco-criticism begins with the belief that imagination and inquiry can strengthen, energize, and drive concern in order to significantly advance our understanding of environmental issues. This range of forms is consistent with other environmental humanities fields' perspectives on environmental phenomena, such as ethics, history, religious studies, and humanistic geography. A wide range of environmental issues must be addressed, with qualitative and quantitative reflections put on hold. Humankind's vision, will, and belief are the foundational discoveries and reinforced regimes. Take some time to appreciate nature's magic, which only manifests when humans adapt and remain committed to environmental restoration. Environment consists of all living and non living things which surround us as a supporting thing to survive the life better.
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¿Está la sociedad humana asemejándose más a las de los insectos? ?
by
Marc Dourojeanni
2026, Revista Iberoamericana de Complejidad y Ciencias Económicas 4 (1): 27-65
The similarities between human societies and those of termites and ants are enormous: life cycles, castes, offspring care, intergenerational mixing, complex cities, armies, agriculture, communications, social memory, social order, and...
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The similarities between human societies and those of termites and ants are enormous: life cycles, castes, offspring care, intergenerational mixing, complex cities, armies, agriculture, communications, social memory, social order, and degradation. The great difference is the individuality inherent to humans, assisted by consciousness and intelligence, and by feelings. Everything insects do is determined by evolution and genetically determined. Humans evolve more through the ability to think and through intraspecific competition. Both societies dominated their environment and can therefore be considered successful. However, there are indications that modern, global human society is increasingly resembling those of termites and ants due to three factors: (i) the growing limitations on individuality, that is, the homogenization of society based on policies and laws, religion, education, advertising and propaganda, and especially the use of the internet; (ii) the growing limitations on intelligence due to the proliferation of the class or caste of the "dupes" or indifferent, non-participating individuals or silent majority, and (iii) the advent of artificial intelligence, which reduces the proportion of "intelligent" individuals in society and concentrates the capacity to think and create in the hands of a few. It is concluded that, although the capacity for abstraction, intelligence, and perhaps feelings will always be maintained in humans, their future societies will increasingly resemble those of social insects, where everyone obeys without question and no one complains.
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Silicon Dreams, Corporate Realities
by
Gabriel Burrow
2026, MOSF Journal of Science Fiction
This editorial explores the interelation of Silicon Valley and science fiction imaginaries, specifically drawn from the Western Canon. It draws upon my personal experience working in the tech sector to reflect on the way that sf is...
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This editorial explores the interelation of Silicon Valley and science fiction imaginaries, specifically drawn from the Western Canon. It draws upon my personal experience working in the tech sector to reflect on the way that sf is instrumentalised in commercial contexts.
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Testemunho ficcional e registro histórico: conexões possíveis entre História Oral, Literatura e Teoria da História em "O Conto da Aia" (1985)
by
Danielle Santos Dornelles
2026
Este trabalho busca investigar as intersecções possíveis entre História Oral, Literatura e Teoria da História, a partir do epílogo do romance distópico O Conto da Aia (Margaret Atwood, 1985), intitulado "Notas Históricas Sobre o Conto da...
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Este trabalho busca investigar as intersecções possíveis entre História Oral, Literatura e Teoria da História, a partir do epílogo do romance distópico O Conto da Aia (Margaret Atwood, 1985), intitulado "Notas Históricas Sobre o Conto da Aia". No epílogo do livro, a autora remonta a transcrição parcial das atas do 12º Congresso sobre Estudos Gileadeanos, realizado durante a Convenção da Associação Histórica Internacional no ano de 2195.  As “Notas Históricas” são apresentadas por dois professores do sexo masculino, Pieixoto e Wade. É apenas neste momento que se descobre que todo o relato de Offred, lido anteriormente, é fruto do processo de transcrição e montagem da narrativa realizado pelos professores a partir de fitas cassete encontradas na “Rota Clandestina Feminina”, localizada na região que correspondia ao antigo estado do Maine, nos EUA. Os professores interpretam, selecionam e hierarquizam suas fontes, revelando vieses de gênero, misoginia e imposição de critérios de relevância que refletem práticas historiográficas tradicionais. Podemos analisar este epílogo a partir de chaves como os regimes de historicidade (Hartog, 2017), a crítica ao positivismo histórico e ao “veto das fontes” (Koselleck, 2006), e discussões sobre a exclusão de mulheres da produção historiográfica (Oliveira, 2018, 2019).  Este trabalho busca argumentar como a ficção de Margaret Atwood pode ser interpretada como uma literatura de testemunho ficcional, atuando como recurso metodológico para refletir sobre História Oral, seus limites e contradições da escrita histórica e evidenciando como narrativas literárias podem revelar, ou não, experiências silenciadas e desafiar a autoridade dos discursos historiográficos tradicionais. De acordo com Márcio Seligmann-Silva (2006, p. 373), a literatura de testemunho transcende sua classificação como um gênero literário, pois emerge como uma faceta da literatura contemporânea em um período marcado por desastres e crises. Nessa perspectiva, a literatura de testemunho questiona o compromisso da própria literatura com o “real”, entendido não como realidade objetiva, mas como evento traumático que resiste à representação, na chave freudiana do trauma (Seligmann-Silva, 2006, p. 373). Essa perspectiva nos convida a olhar para narrativas ficcionais como registros históricos, capazes de revelar memórias e experiências de diferentes tempos muitas vezes “esquecidas” por quem faz, registra e organiza o cânone. Ao considerarmos as vozes ficcionais da obra de Atwood como testemunhos de diferentes tempos, este trabalho busca compreender como a construção histórica não se limita a registros oficiais, mas envolve também um olhar crítico sobre os limites da historiografia tradicional e sobre a complexa relação entre memória, história e narrativa.
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Fantasy’s Role in Approaching War: A Comparison of Lewis’ “The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe” and Barrie’s “Peter Pan”
by
Elif Yılmaz
2026, The European Conference on Arts & Humanities 2024 Official Conference Proceedings
This study examines the versatility of fantasy. Fantasy can be stated to be serving as an escape from the ugliness of reality, as well as a medium to propagandize those ugly aspects, specifically regarding war. The study focuses on Peter...
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This study examines the versatility of fantasy. Fantasy can be stated to be serving as an escape
from the ugliness of reality, as well as a medium to propagandize those ugly aspects,
specifically regarding war. The study focuses on Peter Pan and The Lion, the Witch and the
Wardrobe, and provides an analysis on how various aspects of the genre are reflected through
these works. Peter Pan, although it was written before both world wars, due to involvement of
Barrie in war propaganda in the US, is believed to have an impact on Roosevelt’s representation
of war as a great adventure, echoing Barrie’s Peter. This conceptualization of war is analyzed
as reflecting the power of fantasy to impact mass society. On the contrary, Lewis’ work is
discussed to be an escapist work in this research, serving as a secondary reality away from the
Primary and functions as a means of criticism. This study compares Lewis’s and Barrie’s
literary texts regarding their relations to both world wars and explains the evacuation of
children during World War II and Barrie’s contributions to war propaganda, portraying war as
a great adventure. Therefore, it is concluded that fantasy has the ability to criticize the primary
reality through subversion, while also affecting the ways people view events as disastrous as
war.
Keywords: War, Propaganda, Escapism, Fantasy
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APOCALYPTIC DYSTOPIAN FUTURE IN THE TIME MACHINE BY H. G. WELLS
by
Elif Yılmaz
2026, HEFAD - Journal of Hacı Bayram Veli University Faculty of Letters
This study analyzes The Time Machine (1895) by H.G. Wells as a work of dystopian genre, demonstrating its significance in exploring dystopian narratives and Wells' predictions on a possible apocalyptic future. Dystopian works serve both...
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This study analyzes The Time Machine (1895) by H.G. Wells as a work of dystopian genre, demonstrating its significance in exploring dystopian narratives and Wells' predictions on a possible apocalyptic future. Dystopian works serve both as a warning against the danger awaiting the current societal order in the future and a criticism of the present order.
In this regard, Wells' work acts as a key example of the dystopian genre and illustrates an apocalyptic world in which the society is divided into two different groups called the Eloi and Morlocks. The novel describes the Eloi as a community who live above the ground and maintain a simple life. On the contrary, the Morlocks live under the ground, having a darker existence.
Through this differentiation, Wells underscores conflicts in the current societal order such as class division, rapidly growing technology, and the unrestrained social progress. Even though the setting of the story is in the far away future, Wells in this work successfully portrays the struggles of his own time and warns his readers against the possible paths these struggles might take them in the future. The Time Traveller travels through time, to an apocalyptic future and witnesses the possibilities which the conflicts in his own society might cause in the future firsthand. Consequently, Wells' work serves not only as a story about the future but also as a warning against the current trends in society such as technological developments and the destruction of environment. Therefore, Wells' work encourages readers to critically approach the present order of the society by portraying the probable dystopia that is awaiting them. Hence, what makes The Time Machine an important example of the dystopian genre is the fact that it serves as a warning to make a change and to reestablish balance in the present society. This study argues that Wells' The Time Machine portrays an apocalyptic dystopia which warns against the possible conflicts that might be caused by the workings of the present, underscoring the consequences of societal and technological divides. Consequently, Wells' work emphasizes on the need for societal change and balance to prevent a dystopian future.
Keywords: Dystopia, Apocalyptic, Social Order, Time Travel, Technology.
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Rochelle Spencer 2026 CV
by
Rochelle Spencer
2026
This CV details Rochelle's experience as a writer, editor, curator, and professor.
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Mauvaises-lettres: The New Historical Imagination in Israeli Speculative Fiction
by
Oded Nir
2026, Israeli Speculative Fiction (edited by Vered Weiss and Elana Gomel)
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Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women: Colonial Failures, Trump-Era Setbacks, and Shoals to Justice
by
Parvathy Binoy
2026, Signs
This paper centers on the life and lived experience of Emmilee Risling and argues that contemporary resistance by indigenous women, activists against missing and murdered indigenous is articulated as shoals of power against the US...
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This paper centers on the life and lived experience of Emmilee Risling and argues that contemporary resistance by indigenous women, activists against missing and murdered indigenous is articulated as shoals of power against the US colonial state and Trump era setbacks against collective indigenous women's rights.
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Principles of Remembrance in the Gaze toward Africa in Post-1970 Black Fiction in the United States and Britain
by
Leila Kamali
2026, The Palgrave Encyclopedia of Cultural Heritage and Conflict
This chapter shows the ways in which a gaze toward Africa, depicted in African diaspora literature published in the United States and the United Kingdom between 1970 and today, is intrinsically linked with culturally bound understandings...
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This chapter shows the ways in which a gaze toward Africa, depicted in African diaspora literature published in the United States and the United Kingdom between 1970 and today, is intrinsically linked with culturally bound understandings of time, whether influenced by European Enlightenment politics, by Black resistance movements, or by African traditions. This chapter foregrounds the dynamics of temporality which accompany the theme of an African diasporic gaze toward Africa, showing how the workings of memory are specifically linked to traditions of spirit-possession in examples from African American literature, and to the politics of archive in Black British literary texts. Both spirit-possession itself and the problem of the archive for Black and formerly colonized peoples act as ideologies which shape narrative representations of the significance of the past in African diasporic work. This chapter also engages with Black speculative fictions which position alternative relationships with the future, and which in doing so find tools to access alternative temporalities which are more fitting to African-centered thinking than to Eurocentric perspectives. The practice of imagining African pasts and imagining African futures can be seen as related, though quite different, kinds of anti-colonial projects. Such a perspective is best understood when we consider that many African and other Indigenous cultures generally understand time itself very differently to the way that it is characterized by European and American modernity.
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H.P. Lovecraft's Cosmic Horror and the Genesis of Lost Civilizations Literature: From Fictional Alien Gods to Pseudo-Historical Narratives in the Work of Pauwels, Bergier, and von Däniken
by
Rodolfo Pitti
2026
Abstract This paper examines the profound influence of H.P. Lovecraft's cosmic horror fiction on the emergence and development of lost civilizations literature in the twentieth century. Specifically, we trace the conceptual genealogy from...
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Abstract
This paper examines the profound influence of H.P. Lovecraft's cosmic horror fiction on the emergence and development of lost civilizations literature in the twentieth century. Specifically, we trace the conceptual genealogy from Lovecraft's fictional depiction of alien gods and super-civilizations through the semi-fictional scholarship of Louis Pauwels and Jacques Bergier's Le Matin des Magiciens (The Morning of the Magicians, 1960) to Erich von Däniken's Chariots of the Gods (1968). The analysis demonstrates how Lovecraft's narrative framework—combining mythopoetic worldbuilding with pseudo-archaeological speculation—provided a template for transforming speculative fiction into alternative historical narratives. We investigate how Pauwels and Bergier's deliberate blending of fiction and nonfiction created a liminal textual space where Lovecraftian concepts acquired the rhetorical authority of academic scholarship. Furthermore, we assess von Däniken's systematic appropriation of both Lovecraft's conceptual apparatus and Pauwels and Bergier's research methodology to construct his influential alternative chronology of human civilization. The paper argues that this genealogical trajectory represents a significant case study in the transformation of speculative fiction into cultural mythology, with implications for understanding how narrative strategies shape public understanding of history, science, and the limits of human knowledge.
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Disruptive Pedagogy and AI Participation
by
Makoto Kuroda
2026
AI elucidates Makoto Kuroda’s apology for agnostic adaptation of holarchy of the universe, drawing on Blaise Pascal’s wager on his faith. Next, it simulates aporia generating paper proposal as scholarly output unto the academic...
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AI elucidates Makoto Kuroda’s apology for agnostic adaptation of holarchy of the universe, drawing on Blaise Pascal’s wager on his faith. Next, it simulates aporia generating paper proposal as scholarly output unto the academic institution, depicting the principle of peer review system. Last, it proposes to establish a teaching syllabus that stages aporia systematically, proving the effectivity of AI contribution of speculative investigation.
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Uma narrativa da grande aceleração em tela no filme Old (2021
by
Scheyla J . Horst
2026, RILE
Uma praia isolada onde o tempo passa rapidamente pode ser interpretada como uma metáfora para compreender problemáticas relacionadas à grande aceleração. É este o cenário da história em quadrinhos francesa Château de Sable (Castelo de...
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Uma praia isolada onde o tempo passa rapidamente pode ser interpretada como uma metáfora para compreender problemáticas relacionadas à grande aceleração. É este o cenário da história em quadrinhos francesa Château de Sable (Castelo de Areia, 2010), do escritor Frederik Peeters e do ilustrador Pierre-Oscar Lévy, que foi uma inspiração para o filme Old (Tempo, 2021), do cineasta M. Night Shyamalan. Este texto propõe, por meio de um olhar ecocrítico, a abordagem acerca deste longa-metragem com base em reflexões sobre as narrativas do Antropoceno, pelos apontamentos de Gabriele Dürbeck (2020), e de como o ecocídio pode ser
abordado na ficção científica, a partir de Alexa Weik von Mossner (2012), entre outros autores, evidenciando as possibilidades da ecoficção (David, 2016). Considera-se que filmes como o escolhido aqui possuem o potencial de trazer imagens poderosas que confrontam pontos de vista e alertam para os impactos causados pelo ser humano na natureza, tornando gráficos, números e relatórios em “coisas visíveis” e chocantes.
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CATASTROPHIC CONVERGENCES. WAR, CLIMATE COLLAPSE, AND POSTHUMAN ETHICS IN CONTEMPORARY SPECULATIVE FICTION
by
Bobaru Nicolae
2026, Studii de Știință și Cultură
The 21st century is marked by catastrophic convergences – of war, environmental collapse, and ethical disorientation – that destabilize inherited paradigms of justice, agency, and survival. This article examines how three post-9/11...
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The 21st century is marked by catastrophic convergences – of war, environmental collapse, and ethical disorientation – that destabilize inherited paradigms of justice, agency, and survival. This article examines how three post-9/11 Anglophone novels – Margaret Atwood’s “Oryx and Crake” (2003), Don DeLillo’s “Zero K” (2016), and Octavia E. Butler’s “Parable of the Sower” (1993) – construct a speculative posthuman terrain where climate change, technocapitalism, and militarized necropolitics intersect. Drawing on posthumanist theory, trauma studies, and environmental thought, the article introduces the concept of the ecology of excess to describe systems overrun with waste, data, species, and suffering beyond their capacity for coherence. These texts do not merely depict collapse; they perform it formally and ethically, enacting the breakdown of narrative order and anthropocentric ethics in a world where survival is unevenly distributed and deeply entangled with multispecies relations. By exploring the ethics of bioengineering, cryogenic preservation, and radical adaptation, the novels interrogate what it means to endure in a world that may not be survivable. Literature, in this context, becomes a speculative laboratory for rehearsing new forms of care, relationality, and ethical imagination. Rather than offering salvation, these narratives remain with the trouble, foregrounding shared vulnerability and planetary entanglement. Ultimately, the article contends that posthumanist fiction is vital for rethinking conflict, coexistence, and the ethical possibilities of survival in the Anthropocene.
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Aquatic Human Futures: Fictional Models for Climate Change Survival -80 th Idea & Research Paper (Under Water / Above Water / Near Water)
by
Muhammad Asim - Global Progress Volunteer
2026
**(Under Water / Above Water / Near Water)** This research paper explores the speculative concept of human-aquatic adaptation, inspired by the novel Unknown Stop: Mysteries of the Electronic Journey by me / Muhammad Asim-Global...
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**(Under Water / Above Water / Near Water)**
This research paper explores the speculative concept of human-aquatic adaptation, inspired by the novel Unknown Stop: Mysteries of the Electronic Journey by me / Muhammad Asim-Global Progress Volunteer. The narrative presents a world where humans live underwater like fishes, offering a unique lens to examine survival strategies in the face of climate change and rising sea levels. By reframing fiction as a laboratory for scientific imagination, this paper proposes a structured framework for biological, technological, and societal adaptation. It argues that speculative fiction can serve as a catalyst for innovation, ethical reform, and global preparedness.
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Otro presente fue posible: Poéticas desantropocentradas en el Tecnoceno
by
Pablo Sayago
2026, I Jornadas de Investigadorxs en Formación (UNGS): Problemas comunes y sus debates transdisciplinares en las Ciencias Sociales y Humanas
Este trabajo analiza la cristalización de miradas críticas sobre el presente-tecnoceno en obras contemporáneas de formato instalación que proponen escenarios especulativos en temporalidades dislocadas, problematizando la injerencia humana...
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Este trabajo analiza la cristalización de miradas críticas sobre el presente-tecnoceno en obras contemporáneas de formato instalación que proponen escenarios especulativos en temporalidades dislocadas, problematizando la injerencia humana sobre el desarrollo del paisaje planetario. Para llevarlo a cabo, se observan y comparan las obras Hábitat de Águeda Sobico y Rocío Morgenstern (CCK, 2024) y Éramos la humanidad de Mateo Amaral (Fundación Andreani, 2022), explorando el modo en que  sus narrativas desantropocentradas configuran una estética particular en diálogo con el clima de época en las poéticas contemporáneas resaltando las tensiones en la relación tecnología-naturaleza y agencia humana. El análisis se desarrolló dentro de nuestras investigaciones sobre la intersección biotecnopoética inserta en el grupo de investigación Signos Vivientes (IDH-UNGS), y se inscribe en el marco de las teorías sobre tecnoceno y las ficciones especulativas, considerando el rol de las tecnologías como mediadoras de ontologías expandidas. La comparación entre ambas propuestas permite indagar en distintos modos de articulación tecnopoéticas emergentes e imaginarios basados en un contexto de crisis ecológica y transformación de los paradigmas establecidos de habitabilidad planetaria.
Ponencia publicada en I Jornadas de Investigadorxs en Formación (UNGS): Problemas comunes y sus debates transdisciplinares en las Ciencias Sociales y Humanas [ISSN N° 2618-4621].
El archivo compartido corresponde al extracto del texto dentro del volumen completo, disponible en
Cómo citar: Sayago, P., & Bonnebouche, S. (2025). Otro presente fue posible: Poéticas desantropocentradas en el Tecnoceno. En I Jornadas de Investigadorxs en Formación (UNGS): Problemas comunes y sus debates transdisciplinares en las Ciencias Sociales y Humanas. Universidad Nacional de General Sarmiento.
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Witnessing other times: An ecological calendar and a practice of ecological attention
by
nora ward
and
1 more
Amber Broughton
2026, Ecological Citizen
In this essay, an environmental philosopher and visual artist engage with the temporal experiences of nonhuman others through the creation of an ecological calendar. The calendar project is informed by both an acknowledgement of the...
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In this essay, an environmental philosopher and visual artist engage with the
temporal experiences of nonhuman others through the creation of an ecological calendar. The calendar project is informed by both an acknowledgement of the ethical importance of attention and connection to the natural world, and the awareness of the coexistence of multiple and multispecies timescapes. Ultimately, the essay maintains that the human domination of ecological systems is both spatial and temporal. Decentering the human as the only makers and markers of time can thus create potential opportunities for more relational, integrated and mutually beneficial rhythms and habits.
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From Africa(s): On Brazil, on waters, on the moon, with others
by
Frederico Canuto
2026, Journl African Cinemas
This article aims to introduce a perspective on discussing the concept of the future through a Black and African lens. This entails examining the diasporic and colonial relationships across the Atlantic, an ocean that historically...
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This article aims to introduce a perspective on discussing the concept of the future through a Black and African lens. This entails examining the diasporic and colonial relationships across the Atlantic, an ocean that historically delineated connections between Africa, Europe and the Americas. By analysing imagery from films created by Black artists, collective groups and Black directors, the article seeks to delineate a trajectory highlighting the role of the Black presence in shaping a postcolonial future.
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"Freedom to and freedom from": The Book of Phoenix and the Burka
by
Adriana Cotlet
2026, “Freedom to and freedom from”: The Book of Phoenix and the Burka
This paper is based on a preliminary analysis of the structure and implementation of power in some dystopian, speculative fiction, and science fiction works of literature that depicted the presence of social hierarchies based on...
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This paper is based on a preliminary analysis of the structure and implementation of power in some dystopian, speculative fiction, and science fiction works of literature that depicted the presence of social hierarchies based on oppressive systems and common elements of enactment: isolation, manipulation of identity, and physical violence. More specifically, the analysis was based on the Republic of Gilead in The Handmaid's Tale (Atwood, 1985), on the complicated relations of power among the characters of The Brood (Cronenberg, 1979), and on the role of Capitalocene, Anthropocene, and Plantationcene in The Camille Stories (Haraway, 2016). The focus of the following work is on the presence of the burka and its function in The Book of Phoenix (Nnedi Okorafor, 2015).
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Atmospheric Riffing: Manifesto of a Syndisciplinarian
by
Louise Boscacci
2026, Literary Environments: Place, Planet and Translation. The Annual Conference of the Australasian Association for Literature, Griffith University, Australia. 17-19 July
There it is: that throb into the solar plexus of a deep thrumming electric-edged staccato delivered in steady, constant refrain. Listen. A Tawny Frogmouth somewhere in the old messmate midcanopy, drumming low in the temperate...
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There it is: that throb into the solar plexus of a deep thrumming electric-edged
staccato delivered in steady, constant refrain. Listen. A Tawny Frogmouth
somewhere in the old messmate midcanopy, drumming low in the temperate
crepuscular interchange between day and night. If radical pertains to the root,
the germinal and the generative, the ensemble riffs out an aesthetics of radical
interconnectivity in an epoch of a transforming climate and its unpredictable touch
down effects and affects. It is a modality and a manifesto of the syndisciplinarian. This paper riffs on that manifesto.
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Medusas Rückkehr: Arbeit am Mythos im Chthuluzän
by
Jann Amos Blodau
2026, Irem Atasoy, Habib Tekin (eds.): Mythological Motifs in Narratives
This article explores the return of Medusa as a mythic figure in the context of the Chthulucene, a term coined by the biologist and philosopher Donna Haraway to describe the precarious times following the destabilization of the Earth...
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This article explores the return of Medusa as a mythic figure in the context of the Chthulucene, a term coined by the biologist and philosopher Donna Haraway to describe the precarious times following the destabilization of the Earth system. The text discusses how ecological disruption and the collapse of familiar categories – such as the border between human and nonhuman – have rendered traditional modes of orientation and meaning-making inadequate. Against this backdrop, the article draws on Hans Blumenberg’s concept of “work on myth” to argue that mythic thinking is reactivated as a speculative, narrative practice that negotiates the emergence of nonhuman agencies and the overwhelming complexity and uncertainty of contemporary reality. Medusa, as both a symbol of horror and a liminal figure, is examined through the lens of Blumenberg’s and Haraway’s theoretical frameworks: while Blumenberg interprets myth as a distancing mechanism that renders the monstrous manageable, Haraway reimagines Medusa as a contact zone for new forms of storytelling and ecological entanglement. Ultimately, the article suggests that myth, in its ambivalent and recombinatory forms, offers provisional structures of orientation essential for navigating the volatile landscapes of the present.
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Drone Visuals: Urban Wasteland and Apocalyptic Memory
by
Meng Xia
2026, Space and Culture
Drones have been widely applied in citizen journalism and media communication. During the COVID-19 pandemic, videographers used drone cameras to document lockdown cities, with their footage going viral across social media. This study...
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Drones have been widely applied in citizen journalism and media communication. During the COVID-19 pandemic, videographers used drone cameras to document lockdown cities, with their footage going viral across social media. This study examines "ghost town" drone imagery as both a documentary witness to disaster and the expression of postapocalyptic vision mediated through nonhuman agency. By analyzing these visuals, I interrogate how drone documentation reveals an "apocalyptic memory"-a temporal bridge linking historical precedents to speculative futures. Central to this inquiry is how drone visuals construct urban wastelands while evoking mourning through a negative sublime, manifested in grotesque and uncanny aesthetics. In addition, I investigate how drone documentation demonstrates nonhuman agency through a relational framework, analyzing human-machine interactions and broader social dynamics. Grounded in these observations, the research engages with contemporary postapocalyptic imaginaries, particularly those reflecting existential anxieties stemming from environmental crises.
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Dystopian and Post-Apocalyptic Narratives in the Twenty-First Century
by
GANESH S JADHAV
2026
The twenty-first century has witnessed a remarkable resurgence of dystopian and post-apocalyptic narratives, reflecting widespread global anxieties shaped by climate change, pandemics, technological surveillance, political...
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The twenty-first century has witnessed a remarkable resurgence of dystopian and post-apocalyptic narratives, reflecting widespread global anxieties shaped by climate change, pandemics, technological surveillance, political authoritarianism, and socioeconomic instability. This paper examines how contemporary dystopian and post-apocalyptic fiction reimagines the collapse of social, ecological, and political systems while interrogating the resilience and ethical choices of human communities. Drawing on selected works such as The Road by Cormac McCarthy, Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel, and The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins, the study explores narrative strategies that portray societal breakdown, environmental catastrophe, and the reconstitution of cultural memory. The paper argues that these texts move beyond traditional dystopian pessimism to foreground survival, collective responsibility, and the reconstruction of meaning in fractured worlds. Using interdisciplinary frameworks drawn from ecocriticism, trauma studies, and political theory, the study analyses how post-apocalyptic landscapes function as metaphors for contemporary fears and as speculative spaces for ethical reflection. It further investigates the role of memory, storytelling, and art in preserving human identity amid devastation. The paper concludes that twenty-first-century dystopian narratives serve not merely as warnings but as critical imaginative interventions that challenge readers to confront present crises and envision alternative futures grounded in sustainability, empathy, and social justice.
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PROVISIONAL TECHNICAL MANIFEST -MANIFEST-008 DEFENSIVE PUBLICATION -PRIOR ART REGISTRY
by
Rahkyt Redux
2026
This invention relates to runtime governance of interactive software systems where deterministic code execution must remain coherent under dynamic process, cache, route, and schema drift conditions. It specifically establishes a method...
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This invention relates to runtime governance of interactive software systems where deterministic code execution must remain coherent under dynamic process, cache, route, and schema drift conditions. It specifically establishes a method for ensuring that "looks loaded" states are replaced by "deterministically witnessed" materialization. 4. SUMMARY OF THE INVENTION The invention defines a deterministic method called Cymatic Runtime Engineering, where runtime truth is proven through coupled controls and witness probes.
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The Speculative Palate: Culinary Memory and Diasporic Histories in Fictional Futures
by
Aishwarya mehta
2026, New Literaria
This research paper examines how speculative fiction engages with food as a mnemonic device, historiographical archive, and cultural repository to encode diasporic histories in the face of ecological catastrophe and social upheaval....
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This research paper examines how speculative fiction engages with food as a mnemonic device, historiographical archive, and cultural repository to encode diasporic histories in the face of ecological catastrophe and social upheaval. Through a close reading of Margaret Atwood's The Year of the Flood (2009), Octavia E. Butler's Parable of the Sower (1993), and Ursula K. Le Guin's Always Coming Home (1985), the paper discusses the idea of the "speculative palate" where recipes, foraging, seeds, and rituals encode memory, resistance, and futurity against the forgetting of capitalist amnesia. Engaging with gastronomy studies, memory studies, diaspora studies, and speculative estrangement, the paper proposes a culinary historiography as a form of counter-archive of embodied continuity. Atwood's Gods Gardeners engage in biopolitical resistance through seed-saving and posthuman care; Butler's Afrofuturist seeds reflect trauma even as they produce Earthseed ethics; Le Guin's Kesh feasts mirror utopian abundance through ethnographic ritual. Speculative food fictions serve social imaginaries, modelling sustainability, interdependence, and hope for displaced futures. Those edible stories do not facilitate the cultural forgetting, but they give expression to the ethics of care and sustainability. In conclusion, the theorized research will reveal how speculative food narratives serve to not only feed bodies, but social imaginaries in order to create futures in remembrance, continuity and hope.
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Future-Simulated Realities: Examining Hyperreality in Oryx and Crake in Margaret Atwood’s Fiction
by
Ali H U S S E I N Ali
2026, Asian Journal of Human Services
The rapid evolution of technology and science has blurred the boundaries between objective reality and hyperreality, a simulated world shaped by digital media and biotechnology. While previous studies on Margaret Atwood's Oryx and Crake...
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The rapid evolution of technology and science has blurred the boundaries between objective reality and hyperreality, a simulated world shaped by digital media and biotechnology. While previous studies on Margaret Atwood's Oryx and Crake have examined the novel through ecofeminist and biotechnological ethical lenses, few have analyzed it through Jean Baudrillard's theory of simulacra and hyperreality. This study addresses that gap by employing qualitative textual analysis to explore how Atwood's novel illustrates the dominance of simulations that replace authentic human experiences. Using Baudrillard's theoretical framework, the research investigates how Oryx and Crake portrays corporate compounds, genetically engineered Crakers, and media-constructed desires as simulacra that blur the distinction between the real and the artificial. The findings show that the novel critiques the ethical and existential consequences of a hyperreal world dominated by corporate capitalism and technological mediation. This study contributes to literary and media studies by linking dystopian fiction with postmodern philosophy and emphasizes the relevance of hyperreality in understanding the erosion of truth in contemporary digital culture.
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Science of Fiction, Fiction of Science: A Bidirectional Model of Science Fiction as Sociotechnical Mediation
by
Burak Cem Coşkun
2026
This paper develops a conceptual model of science fiction (SF) as a bidirectional interface between scientific reasoning and narrative construction. Drawing on a recent conversational transcript (provided as a primary source), we argue...
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This paper develops a conceptual model of science fiction (SF) as a bidirectional interface between scientific reasoning and narrative construction. Drawing on a recent conversational transcript (provided as a primary source), we argue that SF is not fundamentally a predictive practice but a human-centered sociotechnical activity that frames present tensions through "supported" speculative scenarios. We introduce (i) the notion of a "fictional garment", fiction as a communicative wrapper for scientific ideas via analogy and allegory, and (ii) a two-arrow interaction model in which fiction can inform scientific questions and methods while science constrains and shapes fictional world-making. We further discuss utopia/dystopia as diagnostic outcomes of an era's capacity to imagine solutions, and we illustrate the framework through brief historical vignettes ranging from Lucian of Samosata to modern cinema.
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Distributed Narrative Systems and the illusion of choice in Contemporary Speculative Fiction How a distributed trilogy functions as a narrative system rather than a linear story
by
David A. Lyons
2026, https://open.substack.com/pub/writinginnotes/p/distributed-narrative-systems-and?utm_campaign=post-expanded-share&utm_medium=web
This essay examines the SYNCD Trilogy — Cryptoamnesia, Cryptoanomaly, and Cryptogenesis — as a distributed narrative system rather than a conventional linear series. Analyzing the prose as the internal reasoning of an artificial narrator,...
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This essay examines the SYNCD Trilogy — Cryptoamnesia, Cryptoanomaly, and Cryptogenesis — as a distributed narrative system rather than a conventional linear series. Analyzing the prose as the internal reasoning of an artificial narrator, the essay argues that the trilogy functions as a training process in which meaning emerges through repetition, drift, and behavioral pattern recognition rather than exposition. The essay addresses the collapse of the boundary between narrator, narrative, and reader, and the structural role of the illusion of choice within systems-driven fiction.
Most speculative fiction treats intelligence as a subject: something to be observed, feared, or explained. A smaller and more disruptive class of work treats intelligence as a structuring principle. In these narratives, the story does not describe a system-it behaves like one.
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Imagining the Early 21st Century Cyborg through Sociotechnical Imaginaries: Human Microchipping, Remediation and Premediation
by
Rongtao Zhang
2026
This research examines the human microchipping participants and the remediation and premediation process of cyborg imaginaries in the twenty-first century, adopting a material historical perspective on sociotechnical imaginaries. Drawing...
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This research examines the human microchipping participants and the remediation and premediation process of cyborg imaginaries in the twenty-first century, adopting a material historical perspective on sociotechnical imaginaries. Drawing on digital ethnographic observations and case studies, the study highlights how companies and individual biohackers actively construct, promote, and negotiate microchipping as a carrier for cyborg imaginaries with the society. The findings revealed contests between public technological acceptance, social anxieties, regulatory pressures, and visions of the utopian body, which together shape the boundaries of microchipping imaginaries. While microchipping has remained a marginal and niche technology with limited practical adoption, its symbolic and imaginative significance endures. Through processes of remediation and premediation, the cyborg continues to operate as a contested and generative figure, bridging the humanities and technological, and informing the trajectories of future embodied technologies through once the imaginaries on microchipping.
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Arctic Noirs: Jewish (Be-) Longing in Solomon Gursky Was Here (1989) and The Yiddish Policemen's Union (2007
by
Atalie Gerhard
2026
Historical Fictions Research Conference at the Friedrich-Alexander University Erlangen-Nuremberg
February 19-20, 2026
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"So, You Wanna Be Free?": A Rhetorical Analysis of Roya Hakakian's Neoliberal Conceptualization of Freedom
by
Parisa Delshad
2026
This paper takes as its point of departure the incompatibility of the 'Woman, Life, Freedom' movement with neoliberalism. The intersectional nature of the movement's demands is at odds with neoliberalism's role in perpetuating the...
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This paper takes as its point of departure the incompatibility of the 'Woman, Life, Freedom' movement with neoliberalism. The intersectional nature of the movement's demands is at odds with neoliberalism's role in perpetuating the subjugation of women (Crenshaw 2017, Rottenberg 2018). Grounded in this perspective, the paper aims to shed light on the neoliberal conceptualization of freedom in the discourses of diaspora writers active in representing the movement. For this purpose, it focuses on Roya Hakakian's texts and speeches, paying special attention to the author's narrative strategy in her latest book, A Beginner's Guide to America: For the Immigrant and the Curious (2021). Here, a second-person narrator addresses a newly-arrived, generic migrant in the United States and guides her through peculiarities of American society. Recounting a tale of historical progress woven through anecdotes of violence and injustice against marginalized communities throughout American history, the narrator represents these episodes as essential milestones on the path to the triumph of 'neoliberal multiculturalism' (Reddy 2011; Melamed 2011). Mirroring neoliberal ideology (Hayek 1944, 1960), the narrator teaches the unknowing migrant addressee that struggles for freedom throughout US history were endeavors to submit to the rule of law and constitution. The narratee is then invited to stoically and resignedly wait until her naturalization ceremony whence her liberties will be protected by the constitution. In line with Mohammad Maljoo's assertion that political Islam is the Iranian face of neoliberalism (Tahririeh 2023), the paper argues that Hakakian's discourse is reflective of American exceptionalism. This is due to its inconsistency evident in its repudiation of the Iranian mode of neoliberalism as oppressive while conflating American neoliberalism with liberty.
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“‘An Organic Being in the Middle of Chicago: An Interview with Ana Castillo”
by
Sarah Wald
2026, Latinx Environmentalisms: Place, Justice, and the Decolonial.
na Castillo (1953-present) was born and raised in Chicago, Illinois. Primarily known as a writer, she originally trained as a visual artist, and she has recently returned to drawing and painting (see book cover). Her writings summon...
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na Castillo (1953-present) was born and raised in Chicago, Illinois. Primarily known as a writer, she originally trained as a visual artist, and she has recently returned to drawing and painting (see book cover). Her writings summon images as vibrant as her visual art works. Her written language is often beautiful, sometimes shocking, and always compelling. Her breadth of genre-from poetry to the academic essay to drawing and painting-reveal her commitment to constant creativity. But it is her novels that stand out most to critics and fans alike. Her work was among the earliest of Latinx literature to catch the attention of ecocritics, namely her novel So Far from God and its portrayal of toxic contamination and environmental injustice. Her work consistently engages with Latinx culture's integration with and respect for the natural environment. In this interview we discuss the influence of her paternal grandmother's curanderismo, the limits of conventional gender roles, and prospects for change in consumerist and exploitative practices. The second of five interviews with writers included in this volume, this conversation fits well within the theme of "Place" explored in this section's chapters, as Castillo directly discusses her sensitivity to neoliberalism's power to shape lived experiences, including one's relation to the local and the global. We spoke in Chicago in November 2017 on the day before a beautiful snowfall covered the city. She was visiting the city to moderate a panel about her work at the American Studies Association convention and to spend time with her family. She now resides in both New York City and eastern New Mexico. It was an honor to speak with her in her hometown. Sometimes it felt the city was feeding her memories through the high-rise hotel windows we sat
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“Agriculture and Asian American Literature”
by
Sarah Wald
2026, The Oxford Encyclopedia of Asian American Literature and Culture
Agriculture is a significant yet understudied theme in Asian American literature. Repre sentations of farming in Asian American literature often respond to and engage with agriculture's important role in Asian American history. As farmers...
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Agriculture is a significant yet understudied theme in Asian American literature. Repre sentations of farming in Asian American literature often respond to and engage with agriculture's important role in Asian American history. As farmers and as farm laborers, Asian Americans have been pivotal to US agriculture, and this agricultural experience was foundational to the formation of Asian American communities in the period prior to World War II. Additionally, literary representations of agriculture in Asian American liter ature navigate racialized traditions of American pastoral and Jeffersonian agrarianism. They have often done so in ways that highlight the systems of racial and economic ex ploitation at work in US society and position US agribusiness in relationship to US colo nialism and neo-colonialism. Consequently, Asian American literature's representations of farming can expose the assumptions around race, property, and citizenship at work in the agrarianism of the 21st-century US alternative food movement. The writings of Carlos Bu losan, Hisaye Yamamoto, and David Mas Masumoto provide case studies of these trends.
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BLURRING THE LINE BETWEEN FICTION AND REALITY: MARGARET ATWOOD'S USE OF HISTORY IN THE HANDMAID'S TALE
by
Alina Tacu
2026, Linguaculture
Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale redefines speculative fiction by basing its dystopian world on real historical events instead of futuristic technology. This method shows that oppressive systems are not just imagined but have existed...
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Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale redefines speculative fiction by basing its dystopian world on real historical events instead of futuristic technology. This method shows that oppressive systems are not just imagined but have existed in history and reflect in the present. The society of Gilead in the novel reflects the strict religious rules of 17th-century Puritan New England, where women had limited rights and faced severe punishments for not following societal norms. Atwood also draws from 20th-century totalitarian regimes like Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia. Gilead's use of propaganda, secret police, and public executions mirror these governments' methods of controlling people and information. Additionally, the novel addresses concerns from the feminist movements of the 1970s and 1980s about reproductive rights. The forced childbearing in Gilead is similar to policies in Romania under Nicolae Ceaușescu, where women were required to have children by the government. By grounding speculative fiction in historical events, Atwood shifts the genre's focus from imagining future technologies to exploring political and social issues. The novel's portrayal of government-controlled reproduction reflects real events like forced sterilizations in the U.S. and Canada, mirroring the Nazi eugenics and Lebensborn programs, and highlighting its relevance to ongoing discussions about personal autonomy. Gilead's combination of church and state resembles past theocracies, showing how religious extremism has been used for political control. The
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From Parasite to Symbiont: Cyborg Identity, Ecological Agency and Posthuman Freedom in Suarez's Daemon and Freedom
by
Ozden Dere
2026, Humanities
This article examines Daniel Suarez's techno-thrillers Daemon (2006) and Freedom™ (2010) as works of speculative fiction that critically engage with themes of posthuman identity, algorithmic governance, and ecological agency. Rather than...
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This article examines Daniel Suarez's techno-thrillers Daemon (2006) and Freedom™ (2010) as works of speculative fiction that critically engage with themes of posthuman identity, algorithmic governance, and ecological agency. Rather than portraying artificial intelligence as a dystopian threat, the novels imagine the Daemon, which is a self-replicating system launched upon its creator's death, as an infrastructural force that reorganizes global systems of power, labor, and survival. Through a posthumanist reading, drawing on thinkers such as Donna Haraway, Karen Barad, Rosi Braidotti, and N. Katherine Hayles, this article interprets the Daemon not as malevolent code, but as an ecological actor embedded in material networks, capable of fostering adaptive forms of life and governance. By reading Suarez's fiction through the lens of posthuman ecocriticism and infrastructural media theory, the article offers a model for understanding freedom, not as a static right, but as a relational capacity earned through participation in sympoietic systems. It argues that speculative fiction can function as a cartographic tool, mapping not only future technologies but future ontologies.
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Phenomenological Implication of Unacknowledged Virtue of The Last Unicorn
by
Makoto Kuroda
2026
AI Claude elucidates the speculative implication of antifantasy in the reading of Makoto Kuroda’s Unacknowledged Virtue of The Last Unicorn, evaluating its arbitrary argument deviating from linear logical demonstration, drawing on the...
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AI Claude elucidates the speculative implication of antifantasy in the reading of Makoto Kuroda’s Unacknowledged Virtue of The Last Unicorn, evaluating its arbitrary argument deviating from linear logical demonstration, drawing on the framework of Eastern philosophy represented by Zen and Shinto.
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Monstrous Woman and the Decolonial Gothic Female Gaze in Nuraliah Norasid's The Gatekeeper
by
Grace V. S. Chin
2026, Science Fiction Studies
Using decolonial Gothic and gender theories, this essay examines Nuraliah Norasid’s novel The Gatekeeper (2017), the first speculative novel to win the Singapore Book Award for Best Fiction. Gatekeeper rewrites the Greek myth of Medusa...
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Using decolonial Gothic and gender theories, this essay examines Nuraliah Norasid’s novel The Gatekeeper (2017), the first speculative novel to win the Singapore Book Award for Best Fiction. Gatekeeper rewrites the Greek myth of Medusa through its protagonist, Ria, to tackle the complex relationship between Malay femininity and the forces of Singapore’s state-driven modernization and global capitalism that shape how race, gender, and class are constructed in the nation. Ria’s monstrous yet resistant Gothic body and dangerous gaze are deployed to expose the colonial and patriarchal matrices of power that have continued to endure through the Singapore state, neoliberal capitalism, and globalization. Beset by multiple contesting discursive forces, the beleaguered Malay female and feminized body thus forms the fraught site of identity and belonging, memory and loss. At the same time, this essay considers how Ria’s body signifies on two distinct levels. First, Ria’s corporeality speaks to and interrogates the fear and anxiety surrounding the feminized Malay Muslim, who is often constituted as an Other within the official discourse of multiracialism in Singapore, which has a majority ethnic Chinese population. Second, Ria’s petrifying vision can be understood through the multiple meanings of the decolonial Gothic female gaze, especially when it is turned onto the colonial and patriarchal formations and systems of power and their violent and damaging effects on the subaltern subject.
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Becoming, agency, and the female body: reading embodiment in Vandana Singh's select stories
by
Pranjit Das
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Debarshi P R A S A D Nath
2026, Taylor & Francis
Vandana Singh's speculative fiction devises new literary and philosophical strategies to challenge the conventional ways of thinking about bodily limits, spatially and temporally. This article offers a new way of looking at three select...
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Vandana Singh's speculative fiction devises new literary and philosophical strategies to challenge the conventional ways of thinking about bodily limits, spatially and temporally. This article offers a new way of looking at three select short stories by Vandana Singh in which she asserts fluidity and relationality of the body by boldly relinquishing its material limits. These three stories have women as their central characters, women who are struggling to break free of the limits imposed by patriarchy. Singh's understanding of patriarchy is rooted in the Indian context; the tropes she uses are either historical or cultural/mythical. In their resistance to fit into the normative models of patriarchy, these women protagonists 'transgress' the idea of bodily, physical, and temporal limits.
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Δiotima; or, Δeir*land A fragmented stori of arkivs, kolektivism, imaginaʃon, & multituds
by
Anna T.
2026
This book is an interactive experimental project about creative writing and language, collectivity and multitudes. It is a collection of fictional archival materials (pages from diaries, correspondence, recipes, announcements, fiction,...
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This book is an interactive experimental project about creative writing and language, collectivity and multitudes. It is a collection of fictional archival materials (pages from diaries, correspondence, recipes, announcements, fiction, interviews, etc.) from the future that reflect the journey of a queer feminist collective living on a Mediterranean island. Through this fictional archival material, and their many authors and writing styles, we see personal and geopolitical developments in the wider region, as well as the aesthetic and linguistic changes created by “Medlish” (Mediterranean English). In Medlish—the language of the future and of the curators of this archival material—we read about their values, thoughts, and feelings about their own time and ours. The author invites you to read the book and to converse with her, whether as fictional characters or not.
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The Search for the Perfect Era: Speculative Fiction and Eutopian Imagination
by
Israel A C Noletto
2026, Fafnir
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