The After Oil Research Collective argue that ‘a genuine global transition away from fossil fuels will require not only a reworking of our energy infrastructures, but a transformation of the petroculture itself’ (After Oil, 9). In this statement, the collective refer to how petroculture has come to shape values, feelings, and societal norms. Petroculture is a field that argues that energy, and crude oil in particular, has shaped the social and cultural imaginary of the twenty first century. Their argument is that a cultural and societal transition must take place to conceive of a future free from present violent and imperialist modes of resource extraction.
View More Energy Futures, Science Fiction, and the Failure of MasteryTag: science fiction
Infrastructural Futures in Chinese Science Fiction
Andy Hageman explores the topic of infrastructure in Chinese Science Fiction.
View More Infrastructural Futures in Chinese Science FictionContemporary Speculative Fiction
What do we mean by this odd subject, Speculative Fiction? If we’re dealing with extrapolative fictions, expressly concerned with imagining alternate futures, presents and pasts, when does now begin and end?…
View More Contemporary Speculative FictionJordan Krall’s Speculative Fiction
Speculative fiction is a paradox. Synonymous with science fiction and “genre literature,” it is also one of the most ancient modes of storytelling in literary history. One could easily identify Plato’s Atlantis…
View More Jordan Krall’s Speculative FictionReconsidering Quarantine in Invasion Narratives
The academic and public interest in supernatural invasion narratives has increased exponentially in the 20th and 21st centuries. According to Terrence Rafferty of The New York Times, the fascination with the zombie apocalypse …
View More Reconsidering Quarantine in Invasion NarrativesFrom Genre to Zenre
In response to the question “what are you reading, my lord?” the young prince simply says “words, words, words!” (Shakespeare, 74). But perhaps the answer Polonius was looking for was a more…
View More From Genre to ZenreAn Ontology of Everything on the Face of the Earth
John Carpenter’s 1982 film, The Thing, is a claustrophobic sci-fi thriller, exhibiting many hallmarks of the horror genre. The film depicts a sinister turn for matter, where the chaos of the replicating, cancerous cell is expanded to the human scale…
View More An Ontology of Everything on the Face of the EarthAndroids in the Academy
There is something uncomfortable about David, the android from Ridley Scott’s 2012 film Prometheus. This is partly due to the various interpellations…
View More Androids in the AcademyAlternative Fictioneers
Outside of academic postmodernism, around the edges of genre fiction, and beyond the purview of the mainstream literary novel…
View More Alternative Fictioneers