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Home , Alternate history, Nisi Shawl

327 Winter 2019 January-February SFRA An Open Access Publication of the Science Research Association Editor Review Sean Guynes PhD Candidate Department of English In this issue ISSN 2641-2837 Michigan State University [email protected] SFRA Review Business Another One?!...... 3 Nonfiction Editor Dominick Grace SFRA Business Professor of English Winter Is Here...... 4 School of Humanities Incoming!...... 4 Brescia University College [email protected] SF Retrospectives Stan Lee ...... 5 Assistant Nonfiction Editor Kevin Pinkham Assistant Professor of English Features College of Arts and Sciences Historical as SF in Osamu Tezuka's Muramasa...... 8 Nyack College The SF in Translation Universe...... 11 [email protected] Meet the ...... 12

Fiction Editor Symposium: Worlding SF Jeremy Brett Symposium Introduction...... 14 Associate Professor and Curator Immersion and Fictionality in Westworld...... 14 Cushing Memorial Library and Queering the Wayfarer Universe...... 17 Archives, Texas A&M University [email protected] The Future, Wouldn't That Be Nice?...... 20 ...... 25 Building Reynolds's Revelation Space...... 29 Media Editor TheCyberpunk's Outerspace Commodification within Us in Villeneuve's of Bodies Arrival...... 33 Leimar Garcia-Siino Semiotic Concepts of Gravity in Solanas's Upside Down...... 37 Lecturer in English Atlantic University College The Otherworldly Self in Tarkovsky's Solaris...... 41 [email protected] Intersexuality in Heinlein's "'—All You Zombies—'"...... 45 and Racial Capitalism in Shawl's Everfair...... 48 Eschatology in ...... 51 Submissions Novelty and Age in Butler's Fledgling...... 54 SFRA Review (ISSN 2641-2837) is Throw Grandma Out the Airlock...... 57 an Open Access review journal pub- Naturalism and the Ontological Complexity of SF Worlds...... 60 lished four times a year by the Sci- ence Fiction Research Association (SFRA). Nonfiction Reviews SFRA Review encourages submis- La ideología de Star Wars...... 65 sions of reviews, review essays, in- Essays on Gender and Identity in the Star Trek Universe...... 66 terviews, and feature articles. Sub- Where No Black Woman Has Gone Before...... 67 mission guidelines are available at http://www.sfra.org/ or by inquiry to Trekonomics...... 69 the appropriate editor. PB SFRA Review 327 Winter 2019 SFRA Review 327 Winter 2019 1 The Doppelganger in 21st-Century Media...... 71

Fiction Reviews Hybrid Child...... 73 The Future Is Female!...... 74 Finding Baba Yaga...... 76

Media Reviews Venom...... 77 Altered Carbon ...... 79

CFP: SFRA Annual Conference 2019 SFRA 2019 will meet in Hawai‘i, a set of islands that Friday, 21 June - Monday, 24 June 2019 after two and a half centuries of Western contact has become the world leader in species extinction, Chaminade University, Honolulu, Hawai‘i while being transformed during the nineteenth century from a wholly self-sustaining Conference : Facing the Future, Facing the into a plantation economy dominated by export Past: Colonialism, Indigeneity, and SF crops and ravaged by epidemics that reduced the Native Hawaiian population by 80% or more, Keynote Speaker: and whose political sovereignty was stolen by the settler-controlled and US-military-aided overthrow The SFRA invites proposals for its 2019 annual of the monarchy in 1893. As we plan to meet on this conference, to be held on the campus of Chaminade occupied land with its long history of indigenous University, Honolulu, Hawai‘i. resistance to colonial incursion, we welcome papers

history and its ongoing effects, to the contemporary ecologicaland panels crisis,on the torelation issues of of science and toeconomic colonial or“I ka more wā mua,literally, ka wā“In ma what hope” is in is front a Hawaiian of you isproverb found justice, and to past and ongoing visions of the future. that can be translated, “In the past lies the future,” 300-500 word abstracts should be sent to what is behind you.” In the Native Hawaiian way of [email protected] or through the Abstract thinking, according to scholar Lilikalā Kame‘eleihiwa, past,“The Hawaiianseeking historical stands firmly answers in the for present, present-day with acceptance will occur by 8 April 2019. his back to the future, and his eyes fixed upon the Submission form by 1 March 2019. Notification of might be, you must face the past to prepare yourself Questions concerning this call for papers, fordilemmas.” the future. Another Thinking way about of interpreting this Hawaiian this proverb saying preconstituted panels, & roundtables can be directed to [email protected] with the subject about ways of knowing, ways of orienting ourselves line "CFP QUESTION," or to the conference’s local in thetime context and space, of science the relationfiction brings of our up notions questions of organizers, John Rieder ([email protected]) and the possible to our understanding of history, the Ida Yoshinaga ([email protected]) of the University of technological practice in relation to the past and the chaminade.edu) of Chaminade University. future,ethical and and our political expectations obligations of social of change our scientific- as well Hawai'i at Mānoa, and Justin Wyble (justin.wyble@ as our sense of how comes about.

2 SFRA Review 327 Winter 2019 SFRA Review 327 Winter 2019 3 known as the Belgian Congo, and which is today in to become part of society again. our world occupied by the Democratic Republic of ’sThe sex/gender/sexuality body is “corrected,” correlation he/she ispresented allowed the Congo, Rwanda, and Burundi. The spans in the story seem to be based on an underlying the years 1889 to 1919, telling the story of the assumption that biology dictates clear rules for initial impetus behind the creation of Everfair by how men and women should look and what their the British socialist Fabian society, together with a bodies should be capable of doing. The potential black American orator and former slave (modeled on Williams), and some money heterosexuality is therefore never actually realized from a black missionary society, all the way up to the of a queering of either the sex/gender binary or integration of indigenous tribal into rooted within heteronormativity. the new state, and the decolonial revolution that and the protagonist (as well as the story) stays firmly the socialists, Christians, and indigenous Africans Works Cited Barrett, Rusty. “Is Queer Theory Important with the novel ending shortly after WWI and a seriesof Everfair of treaties lead against that ratify King LeopoldEverfair’s of existence Belgium, Sexuality: Contesting Meaning in Theory and in the international legal sphere. While the novel for Sociolinguistic Theory?” Language and was largely well-received by sf readers and critical pp.25-44, Center for the Study of Language and , it was also sharply criticized for its Information,Practice, edited 2002. by Kathryn Campbell-Kibler, form: a series of short, temporally disjointed but chronologically organized , none longer Masterpieces: The Best of the than 18 pages (out of a 400-page novel). In part, this Heinlein,Twentieth Robert Century, E. “‘—All edited You byZombies—’.” Orson Scott 1959. Card, is a matter of style: is well-known as an Ace, 2001. author of short stories, which she has been writing professionally for almost 25 years; but it is also a Medical Authority, and Lived Experience. Duke matter of utopian praxis. More on that later. Karkazis,UP, 2008. Katrina Alicia. Fixing Sex: Intersex, For now, I want to contextualize some of the generic concerns the novel raises, and in particular the relationship it indexes between , Alternate History and Racial alternate history, and history itself. In a broadly Capitalism in Shawl's Everfair Marxist reading and certainly following John Rieder’s understanding of the mass cultural Afrofuturism’s Specter: Alternate History, Racial system, if emerge in response to certain Capitalism, and Nisi Shawl’s Everfair social and historical formations, and are forms that narrate the material conditions of those producing Sean Guynes the genre, then it stands that the emergence of late- Michigan State University twentieth-century Afrofuturism was a response to, well, something. A rather obvious statement, but one Day 3 | December 8, 2018 | 9am that has yet to be fully historicized even now, in a Afrofuturism post-Black Panther moment when Afrofuturism is trending across the media industries both because it IN THIS PAPER I discuss the generic lines that provides representation and hope for Afrodiasporic course through Nisi Shawl’s 2016 novel Everfair, and peoples and because, like other forms of black popular in doing so I use the novel as a conceptual space for culture in the colonial and especially American thinking about Afrofuturism’s relation to history, world: it makes money. While we can—and certainly temporality, and the political present. For those should—speculate about the many reasons why who don’t know—and I hope I can convince you Afrofuturism emerged when it did, I want to scale to get the novel right away—Everfair is about the out and suggest that Afrofuturism, particularly in the American black diaspora, is at its core a response friendly, disability-championing, anti-colonial state to formations of racial capitalism. increation Central of Africa, a multi-racial, in and around intergenerational, the land formerly queer- What this means, ultimately, is that Afrofuturism 48 SFRA Review 327 Winter 2019 SFRA Review 327 Winter 2019 49 is as preoccupied with the past, with the legacies of colonialism and racial slavery that brought racial blackness is what ultimately seems to motivate capitalism into existence, as it is with imagining the Afrofuturism’smemory” of racialconstant capitalism return to inthe the past history even as ofit future, and in doing so it is, like all of speculative beckons better . And we see something like

capitalist present. Shawl’s Everfair evidences text and blockbuster hit Black Panther, where the contemporaryfiction, a meditation Afrofuturism’s on the conditions simultaneous of the embrace racial- worldthe now of Wakanda quintessential is created contemporary both out of Afrofuturist notions of of futurism and countermemory in its efforts to black African cultural history through the somewhat imagine, create, and embody a world hospitable to incongruous pastiching of cultural objects, music, black folks and other people of color. In doing so, art, dance, and language from all over sub-Saharan it complicates understandings of the relationship between futurity and history as they might be (albeit Wakanda is also produced in opposition to this rather simply) understood in Afrofuturism. In a very history,Africa in having order toultimately create “Wakandan avoided and culture,” defended but clear, formal, , and ultimately utopian sense, Everfair achieves its pan-Afrodiasporic framing of a the continent’s black bodies. hopeful futurism by remaking the past through the itselfIf Afrofuturismagainst racial is capitalism’s haunted by commodificationthe history of racial of genre of alternate history. capitalism, then alternate history confronts and Shawl’s novel charts the birth of a utopian reimagines the history that haunts the genre. The Afrofuturist project by asking not “what could be, historical situatedness of Afrofuturism is especially evident in alternate history that return to devastating genocide in modern African history nexus events where the presents and futures of hadin the become future, the if” cause but instead for anti-colonial “” thestruggle most and decolonization half-a-century early. Like other Terry Bisson’s Fire on the Mountain (1988), though writers of alternate history, Shawl rethinks what heracial himself capital is arenot either black, in and flux Steven or made Barnes’s hypervisible. Lion’s Blood (2002) and Zulu Heart (2003), for example,

might be considered a “turning point” or what terrain and legacy of racial slavery in both global blackKaren writersHellekson of inalternate the only history, sustained such treatment as Steven of andoffer U.S. alternate contexts. worlds Racial thatcapitalism, refigure as theJodi historicalMelamed Barnesalternate and history Colson calls Whitehead, a “nexus the event.” pivotal Like moment other makes clear, is bound up with colonialism, but also with the more recent discourses of the - state, of nationalism, and of the nation in an always theShawl life choosesof racial capitalism. is specific In to Everfair, the history Shawl of offers black a global context. Shawl’s utopian nation operates at newracial temporality oppression, for one imagining that represents utopian a flashpointpossibilities in the juncture of these formations of power, placing her narrative about the formation of this joint of black labor, bodies, and life. socialist-European/indigenous-African revolution springingShawl’s from Everfair, the atrocities both ofthe the commodificationnovel and the against colonial forces of the Belgian Congo at the world-making project that gives the novel its chronological crux of what Hobsbawm labels, in name, contextualizes the relationship between Afrofuturism as a political of cultural production and the alternate history genre as a butworld-historical clearly concerned terms, with the “agean activist of empire.” hermeneutics for Setthe duringpresent, the Everfair European is important “scramble to for thinking Africa” Presently understudied, precisely because they buck about the relationship between history/futurity theunique typical articulation narrative ofof future-oriented science-fictional speculative worlding. and alternate history/Afrofuturism because the novel simultaneously articulates multiple vectors to invoke, Afrofuturist alternate represent of colonial, capitalist, racial, and even religious afiction key thattextual-political the “futurism” ground of “Afrofuturism” for contesting is meant the power as they operate in relation to racialized intersection between discourses of history, power, bodies. Shawl achieves this—and here’s where I race, capital, and empire. To borrow a term from return to my observation about utopian form in , where he uses it in the context of the novel—by accreting multiple viewpoints in a religious colonialism in Dune, the “demanding sprawling, complex narrative that communicates the 48 SFRA Review 327 Winter 2019 SFRA Review 327 Winter 2019 49 shifting, always-becoming promises of the Everfair and most of them get 5 to 8 chapters, meaning that revolution against European powers. Everfair the novel gives the reader no time to settle in to the probes the relationship between an Afrofuturist mindset of any single political position, but keeps conception of black liberation, the scars of racial them always separate, and so maintains an openness history, and the generic legacies through which these discourses are mediated. By assembling Chinese narrative inability to pinpoint a singular political indentured servants, black American former slaves, directionand indefiniteness for Everfair. formally The chapters congruent scramble with thefor white British socialists, and indigenous Africans from multiple cultures, the novel offers a hopeful meditation on possibilities for cross-racial justice fornarrative sovereignty space fromas the European Everfairers powers fight altogether.for land and movements while also emphasizing the necessity of blackIt liberation,is thus no and great as thesurprise, indigenous at the Africans end of fight the decolonial projects that place black liberation before novel, though perhaps surprising and maybe the appeasement of whiteness and white allies. even unsettling for the average white reader who To backtrack and clarify some of the narrative: imagines themself in solidarity with the most Everfair, as a state, comes into existence when sympathetic white characters (of which there are European socialists purchase land in the Congo few), that Everfair kicks the white colonizers out from Belgium, thereby superseding anything like of the country, only allowing mixed-race Lisette to autochthonous rights to the land and producing stay (and then only because of her close friendship a legal state, from the Euro-American vantage, on indigenous land. Everfair thus begins as a colony, black Americans to remain, as well as the Chinese laborers,with Queen saying Josina). that both King represent Mwenda populations allows the Belgium’s slaving practices in the Congo. The forced to leave their places of origin, whereas the Europeansalthough one and explicitly black Americans set up to fightarrive back in Everfair, against white settlers actively took the land from indigenous build a city, start preaching—although there are Africans, purchasing it in a capitalist system of tensions about proselytization among the socialists international trade that ultimately corroborates the and black Americans—and eventually take in forces of racial-capitalism that brought about the

Shawl also narrates the internal struggle of the African Everfairers, the nation is a decolonial African refugees fleeing Belgium’s colony. Parallel to this, nation,atrocities one in thethat Congo rejects in whitenessthe first place. but Forrecognizes Shawl’s the geopolitical necessity, because always forced by peoples.Congolese Ultimately, King Mwenda the toEverfairers maintain authorityand Congolese in his colonial power relations, to interact with whiteness joinconflict forces with under Leopold the Everfairand other banner, indigenous with Mwenda African nonetheless. Everfair offers narrative closure of a sort, but it works something like the early Roman Republic, actually ends at a new beginning, an unforeseen and whichas King saw but a a tension representative between council the Senate advising and him; the contingent moment in which the always-becoming occasionally appointed military dictator. process of utopian world-making becomes and Mwenda and the Congolese, including a people becomes. Like its formal properties of non-closure, called the Basanga who gift the Everfairers with of chronological, perspective, and geographical displacement from chapter to chapter, Everfair turns largely out of necessity, and there is constant to multiplicity and thus rejects the utopian narrative tensionsteampunkified among the nuclear factions power, over join their the competing colonizers since that follows a (typically male) protagonist through the architecture and social planning of this or that improved society. Everfair holidayvisions after for Everfair—perhaps Jackie Owen, the Fabian best exemplified leader whom in is fragmentary, composed of many parts and Daisy,the Europeans’ Everfair’s attempts British poetto name laureate, the first refers national to as people, some of whose motivations and visions for the nation’s founder. That there is always a tension the state change over time as they interact with drawn across racial-capital lines of whiteness/ other characters, and so Everfair comes formally to blackness, settler/indigenous is underscored by the represent the social body of Everfair itself. Like the novel’s refusal to situate its narrative voice in any social novels of the period during which Everfair single protagonist. There are eleven POV characters, is set, Shawl’s Afrofuturist, alternate historical, 50 SFRA Review 327 Winter 2019 SFRA Review 327 Winter 2019 51 (or steamfunk) novel attempts to capture with the stardate given at the beginning of each the whole of a utopian society that is in the process of episode. The franchise creates a world based on becoming. Shawl’s formal intervention in the utopian the analogical paradigm and its very objective is novel’s structure stitches together the struggles of to estrange and show the contemporary as European socialism, African decolonialism, and US unjust and arbitrary. Even if the were anti-racism while recognizing that the very project of Everfair is always imbricated with the forces of racial capitalism, that it is itself a product of the blunt and the artistic value questionable, Star Trek colonial scramble for black land and bodies. never was purely “ideological” in the Marxist sense To invoke the terminology of this conference, cognitiveof “false consciousness” estrangement and and—at thus, I leastbelieve, until it should Deep Nisi Shawl’s Everfair is an exercise not purely in this Spacebe considered Nine (DS9)—it science was fiction. utopian. It does present us with very sf-y practice of world-building, but an actual Suvin makes a compelling argument for science praxis of worlding that remakes history in order to repurpose how we think about Afrofuturism, about genre, history, blackness—and all of their 76).fiction’s And here descent lies fromthe problem. , Suvin calling claims it “if that, not a possibilities for mobilization in the present. daughter,As different yet a niecefrom religious of utopia” ideas (Metamorphoses about other worlds such as Paradise or Hell, utopia is an historically alternative wishful construct. Its islands, valleys, communities or worlds are Eschatology in Star Trek constructed by natural intelligent beings— human or humanoid—by their own forces, World Re-Building: Eschatological Thought in without transcendental support or intervention. the Science Fiction Genre as Exemplified by Star Utopia is an Other World immanent to the Trek world of human . . . and not transcendental in a religious sense. This differentiates it from Agnieszka Urbańczyk , horror-fantasy and -tale, which Jagiellonian University, Poland happen outside history—even an alternative or hypothetical history; it similarly differentiates SF Day 3 | December 8, 2018 | 3:30pm from kindred yet opposed genres. (Positions and Star Trek II: Before Discovery Presuppositions 34) Utopia in Suvin’s understanding is secular. But IN THIS PAPER I focus on the notion of Star Trek as Thomas More, universally recognized as the father of the genre, considered religion integral to his of eschatological —especially the phantasm utopia. Moreover, he himself was proclaimed a saint ofa utopia an inevitable and more . specifically on the franchise’s use SF as an essentially rationalist genre and make thisby the rationality Catholic its Church. constitutive Even if feature, we try towe definemust I am using Darko Suvin’s definition of science I do realize that Suvin himself would consider Star remember that religion was historically there at its fiction as it is surprisingly applicable to Star Trek. Trek a but it is widely known Suvin is core. I believe Star Trek is a great example of the very selective in his approach and treats cognitive paradoxes this may lead to.

though the same effect can be evoked by texts he a utopia—the Federation is a post-scarcity, just, and estrangement as essential to “high literature” even would call pulpy. Though there were many blunders egalitarianIt is quite society obvious in whichthat Star (at Trek least was declaratively) created as in Star Trek’s history, the respective series were race, class, gender or sexuality cannot legitimize often counter-hegemonic in their time. Star Trek exclusion. With the universal replicators introduced in The Next Generation (TNG) the need for the market of science and the limits science describes is pivotal economy dissolves. And the point of this utopia is “it toisn’t the extremely entire franchise. scientifically As opposed accurate to but stories the notiontaking Americans that a better world could be created if Trek almost obsessively brings up historical time, theycould embraced be us.” Gene humanism Roddenberry and rationalism, was trying andto show that place “a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away,” Star 50 SFRA Review 327 Winter 2019 SFRA Review 327 Winter 2019 51