This chapter argues that the resurgence of genre fiction in the contemporary period demonstrates alterations in the status of romance kinds rather than the direct impact of postmodernism. Novels make possible worlds; the actions staged in imagined worlds need not be verisimilar or plausible. Though realism has been the dominant mode of the novel, it is not the only option, especially for writers who have read widely in genre fiction since childhood. Postmodernism is not required to explain why the characteristics of romance narratives persist. Genre fiction’s thrilling plots, strong affects of suspense, curiosity, and wonder, larger-than-life characters, and reliance on supernatural explanations or conspiracy theories, have invigorated contemporary fiction. Postmodernism is best understood as a style whose adoption expresses a writer’s desire to be considered experimental, irreverent, up-to-date, and still “literary.” Emergent patterns of prize-winning novels show the erosion of the distinction between literary and genre fiction.

This chapter surveys portrayals of money within US speculative fiction. While they may take us to alien planets or alternate universes, such works also serve to remind us how strange “ordinary” money already is. Speculative fiction has often sought to reimagine money in some more rational or explainable form. These thought experiments often propose money based on some purportedly stable and incontrovertible value, such as labor, time, energy, or motion. There is a second and somewhat distinct tendency, which envisions reputation-based currencies and other “storied moneys,” often capable of reflecting diverse incommensurable values. Then there are portrayals of large fortunes that, whether or not they come with overt speculative elements such as magic or futuristic technologies, can also take on an aura of the fantastic. In particular, large fortunes become storied money to the extent that they reflect and enact their owners’ personal characteristics, relationships, and histories. Speculative fiction also often blurs with speculative practices, from Josiah Warren’s Time Store in the 1820s to the Technocracy movement of the 1930s to contemporary cryptocurrency, Non-Fungible Tokens, and blockchain finance. This porous boundary invites the question: might money itself be understood as a kind of speculative fiction?

This chapter traces and contingently periodizes the development of Latinx science fiction from the early 1990s to the present, and charts its historical, political, and cultural contexts. While noting the complex genealogies of the genre, the chapter begins with a survey of Latinx dystopian and post/apocalyptic works responding to the nightmarish aftermath of the passing of NAFTA. The chapter then shifts to examine how Latinx science fiction following 9/11 foregrounds how Latinxs have never been safe in our own ostensible homeland. The remainder of the chapter maps how the genre proliferates in an unprecedented manner following the turn of the millennium, diversifying in terms of ethno-racial identity, subgenres, tropes, and subject matter that demand hemispheric approaches. The diverse narratives comprising Latinx science fiction reengage the post/apocalyptic, cyberpunk, and dystopian/utopian to excavate and linger in the past so as to radically restructure both the present and future. This chapter explores how Latinx science fiction narratives – differential, dissensual, and generative – collectively envision brown temporalities and futures of being-in-common.

The chapter delves into the intricacies of representations of outer space, exposing their entanglement with colonialist narratives. It analyzes the ideology behind space exploration to show that, rather than being something “new” or aligned with futurism, these texts repeat colonialist conquest narratives while proposing alternative methodologies of “worlding” beyond conventional materialist paradigms. By critiquing mainstream notions of space travel, this chapter illuminates the Cartesian–Baconian separation of humans from nature, which, the author argues, perpetuates antiblackness. Through an analysis of Sun Ra’s Space Is the Place, the chapter illuminates how alternative narratives use outer space as a metaphor to oppose notions of the separation of humans from the natural world and anti-blackness. Sun Ra’s film not only challenges traditional modes of travel but also hints at alternative ways of understanding exploration, most especially of oneself. This shift in perspective signifies a departure from the conventional idea of discovering new worlds towards a more profound concept of co-creating realities, emphasizing shifts in consciousness over mere geographical exploration. Drawing upon the work of Katherine McKittrick and others, this chapter also invites a reconsideration of the ways in which geography itself is constructed, rather than an objective material fact of the phenomenological world.

This chapter focuses on “imaginary space” – literary spaces without a real-world referent. The question of how detached fantasy worlds like C. S. Lewis’ Narnia came to be thinkable in the twentieth century frames the chapter, which argues for fantasy space as a strategic response to the alienations produced by twentieth-century capitalism. Weaving together a history of exploration with a history of different types of imaginary space, the chapter traces the emergence of works like Lewis’ The Chronicles of Narnia out of earlier forms of imaginary space. Types of space reviewed include the settings of the traveler’s tale (e.g., Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels and Wu Cheng’en’s Journey to the West), Thomas More’s Utopia, and the Romantic atopias of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and William Wordsworth’s Prelude. The chapter draws on the theories of Yi-Fu Tuan, Fredric Jameson, Henri LeFebvre, and Michel Foucault to explain the distinctions between different formations of imaginary space. It concludes with a reading of Susanna Clarke’s Piranesi as a text reflecting the changing value of fantasy space in the twenty-first century.

Contemporary speculative genres such as science fiction, fantasy, and horror have generated an uncountable number of non-realist plants that can provide new ways of re-enchanting – and returning us to – the real plants with which we inhabit the planet. Depictions of fantastical plants do not, however, always reflect an environmentalist agenda, and the long pedigree of monstrous plants demonstrates considerable complexity, for example in encoding monsterised images of both coloniser and colonised in the figure of the aberrant plant, or, in African-American literature, critiquing the plantation system’s violence against human and non-human bodies. In many serialised works, the plant can serve as merely a novel monster of the week among many interchangeable excuses for action and adventure, while other texts deploy the alien plant in order to imagine different modes of consciousness and being, or offer the promise that we might communicate more meaningfully with plants. The unusual plants to be found in much botanical speculative fiction may cultivate ecological and other-species consciousness in unconventional ways, as we see in texts from authors as different as J. R. R. Tolkien in his mid-twentieth-century epic fantasies and Richard Powers in his 2018 climate change novel The Overstory.

Familiarity with chemistry from children’s toy kits leads Weinberg to investigate physics, the subject that underlies all of chemistry. He reads George Gamow’s Mr. Tompkins books, among others. He is admitted to the famous Bronx High School of Science, where he becomes friends with Shelly Glashow and Gary Feinberg, who would also become well-known physicists. He wins a New York state scholarship to Cornell.

Late seventeenth-century scholars sought to distinguish themselves from the stereotype of an academic pedant. They developed a new model of a scholar who was "prudent" or "gallant," that is, witty, strategic, fashionable, and judicious in career choices and areas of focus and able to perform fluently in mixed and noble audiences. They aimed to establish their reputations as celebrities by attracting attention in popular genres such as vernacular periodicals. Historians have recently identified this new model as an ancestor of the research scholar. Early modern academics constructed this model in contrast to the stereotype of doctrinaire bookworms committed to a priori systems. Prudent and gallant scholars embraced the change of knowledge over time. From a position of deep ignorance, they nevertheless dared to frame conjectures that might be disproven. They pivoted quickly in response to new evidence and varying audiences. Major exhibited these ideals in his vernacular science fiction, Voyage to a New World without a Ship or a Sail, and in his adoption of Fama (fame or rumor) as his personal brand.

The chapter reflects on four approaches to desire present in American science fiction: normalization, displacement, reification, and reimagining. Fanfiction or fanfiction-adjacent novels such as Becky Chambers’ The Long Way to a Small Angry Planet (2014) are set in queernormative worlds and as such normalize queer desire. Feminist depictions of separatist women’s communities, such as Joanna Russ’s “When It Changed” (1972), Nicole Griffith’s Ammonite (1993) or Larissa Lai’s The Tiger Flu (2018), displace queer desire, situating lesbian sex and pleasures in the background of the narrative concerned with the social and political implications of a world without men. In Samuel R. Delany’s “Aye, and Gomorrah” (1967) and Lidia Yuknavitch’s The Book of Joan (2017) desire is reified as it serves as a condition of full humanity. Finally, stories of human/nonhuman encounters seem to lend themselves particularly well to the efforts to reimagine desire. In Octavia E. Butler’s Xenogenesis trilogy (1987-9) and Annalee Newitz’s Autonomous (2017), alien and robot characters experience desire and pleasure as diffused and independent of binary sex/gender systems.

This chapter considers contemporary environmentalism through the lens of ecotopia, a modification of the utopian form that includes the ecological as a core consideration. The idea that the nonhuman world should have meaningful political status is a radical transformation of the usual terms of utopia, rendering certain utopian tropes (like the technology-fueled extinction of vermin or pests) impossible while activating other new possibilities both for the transformation of the social and for individual self-actualization. In particular, ecotopias are distinct from most utopias in their abiding suspicion of technology; in an era of escalating climate disaster, this suspicion of technology becomes increasingly urgent even as it becomes complicated by the perceived need for some miraculous techno-fix to ameliorate the worst impacts of climate change even in ecotopia. A short coda discusses real-world ecotopian projects, attempts to make such visions real as a model to others for what might yet be.

This chapter looks at the ways sf visions of the future published in the decades following World War II both challenge the dominant ideology of American exceptionalism – the notion that the United States is a single homogenous nation uniquely exempt from history – and the Program Era division between literary and genre fiction. Both Program Era realism and sf develop representations of the present. However, sf’s mirror is a distorting anamorphic one, presenting imaginary futures that help its readers cognize the contradictions, conflicts, and struggles that are always at work in any historical situation, and which naturalizing formulations such as American exceptionalism occlude. The chapter traces shifting practices of representing the future, beginning with 1950s dystopias, postapocalypses, and alternate histories through the radical visions of the New Wave and the new practices of postmodern cyberpunk and critical dystopia up to the recent wave of literary sf and climate change fiction.

A long tradition of pandemic – or plague – literature, dating back at least as far as classical Greece, has used catastrophic communicable disease as a backdrop to explore the human condition: what it means to live in a community of other humans, and, as awareness of the crises of environmental devastation and climate change grows, on a planet with other living organisms. In different ways, and with differing resolutions, twentieth- and twenty-first-century works of pandemic fiction show how pandemics stem not only from human practices, but also from the values, beliefs, and stories about the past – the histories – in which they are rooted. Whether dystopic or utopic, apocalyptic or contained, literary pandemics warn that in order to change the way humans collectively inhabit the world, we need to change the dominant stories we tell about it.

This chapter offers an interpretation of Ursula K. Le Guin’s award-winning work of feminist science fiction, The Left Hand of Darkness, from the standpoint of a Hegelian understanding of the politics of recognition. It identifies three approaches to the politics of recognition, associated with the ideas of the politics of difference, the politics of identity, and the politics of identity-and-difference. The first is based on the notion of order, hierarchy status, and relationships between those who consider themselves to be unequals. The second is based on the notion of dialogue and communication between those who consider themselves to be equals. It sets aside all differences as being morally irrelevant. As such, it is associated with the notion of strong cosmopolitanism. The third attaches importance to both the similarities and the differences that exist between individuals. Le Guin’s commitment to feminism in the novel is sometimes associated with the second of these approaches. She is thought to be a strong cosmopolitan thinker. The chapter argues that Le Guin is in fact an advocate of the third approach. She is best thought of as a weak cosmopolitan thinker.

Often focused on the rapid development of technologies (both scientific and social) and their dangers, American science fiction (SF) novels have highlighted how the twentieth century is characterized by truly global crises and possibilities, from the mass migrations and their various exploitations in the early twentieth century, to the Cold War and the direct threat of global nuclear destruction, to giving voice to those denied rights and silenced both in the earlier SF canon and in the larger body politic, and to the climate emergency. Distancing these political issues from the real, twentieth-century SF novels may risk making specific political moments seem fantastic, but they can simultaneously enable new forms of global and communal visions that are (increasingly) necessary to political action. To discuss these visions, the chapter discusses a range of different traditions running through SF and parallel forms of work throughout the twentieth century, with a particular focus on the role of Black and Afrofuturist writers in the period.