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This editorial from Performance Research explores the concept of the mundane and its significance in everyday life and performance. The authors argue that the mundane is often overlooked and undervalued, but it plays a crucial role in sustaining our lives and can be a source of inspiration for artistic performances. The issue includes a range of articles and analyses that examine the politics, aesthetics, and intersections of the mundane with other disciplines. The authors hope that this exploration of the mundane will provide new perspectives and appreciation for the often overlooked aspects of daily life. [Extracted from the article]

An interview with Boston-based artist Allison Maria Rodriguez, is presented. Topics include examines the health of planet and the interconnection between species with extinction of animals and environmental devastation; and video "The Great Silence" by the artists Jennifer Allora and Guillermo Calzadilla in collaboration with the science fiction writer Ted Chiang.

Very broadly speaking, beginning with the development of a social science-fictional mode, a number of postwar authors began exploring how forms of exceptionally accurate foresight might effect the development of a society. The social effects of the mobilization of extraordinary forms of prognostication were explored by numerous authors in the 1940s and 1950s, including Alfred Bester, Philip K. Dick, A.E. van Vogt, and Isaac Asimov. This became a significant, but theoretically and critically understudied, motif in sf during the 1960s and 1970s. Relative to the study of prognostication in history, this body of sf literature provides a unique perspective on the relationship between predictive methods and governance, offering a corpus of theoretical reflections on how the implementation of hypothetical, infallible (or nearly infallible) prognostic systems could affect different types of social order. In this essay, I will briefly explore the development of prognostication and precognition as sociallyembedded novums and investigate what these sources tell us about prognostication in history when viewed through the lens of Western metaphysics and the Western literary imagination. In doing so, I propose a binary taxonomy as a heuristic, organizing texts with prognostication or precognition as their central novum into two general modes: (1) positivist/techno-optimist and (2) romantic/techno-pessimist. The intellectual history of these tendencies in the literature is explored and compared through several exemplary texts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay explores the connection between R.L. Stevenson and H.G. Wells, with a particular focus on their shared interest in the ethical implications of expansionism at the close of the nineteenth century. In The Island of Doctor Moreau, Wells surprisingly appears to have extensively borrowed from and reworked Stevenson’s Pacific tale The Ebb-Tide. On these grounds, it is possible to trace an implied conversation between Wells and Stevenson, which takes its cue from Robert M. Philmus’s pioneering works on the “Strange Case of Moreau.” Moreau, as Philmus and other critics have noted, is in fact rich with intertextual connections, which complicate its meaning and make it highly ambivalent. The Ebb-Tide, a major and leading source text seemingly as relevant as Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, has been largely neglected by contemporary criticism. Bringing more evidence to the case, this essay also connects Wells and Stevenson to a shared ideological awareness, while shedding more light on the sociopolitical horizons of Wells’s early sf. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, the science fiction narrative Sultana's Dream, tale written within the scope of feminist speculation by Rokeya Hossain, in 1905, will be a pretext for talking about the women's movement at the beginning of the last century, be it either the one referring to a new and fruitful intellectual production or the social movements in which they were participants. Hossain is a Bengali Muslim woman born in the great colonial India, in the region of what today is Bangladesh. Considered an important exponent of the so-called "first wave feminisms in Islamic contexts", her science fiction writings and essays make her a figure of great relevance to the insurgent demands for gender equality in the region, and she, in fact, still is an important feminist figure today in Southeast Asia. We will explore in this text the colonial and national geopolitical context that imbued Rokeya Hossain's creative imagination both in her works of fiction and in her political participation as an intellectual agitator, writer, thinker and founder of women's associations that will also be the substrate for her works of fiction. We will focus mainly on the tale Sultana's Dream, since it can be seen as one of the great feminist utopian works of the beginning of the last century and whose elements still support decolonial feminist emancipatory projects today. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article focuses on the change in perception of humanoid androids in science fiction from Philip K. Dick's cult novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968) and its later film adaptations, to the depictions of androids and people in the struggle for survival and immortality in the TV series Battlestar Galactica (2004-2009) and Caprica (2010). Science-fiction novels usually outline the author's ideas about the near or distant future of the world with which they are confronted on a daily basis. They usually warn readers of a possible apocalypse or present models of an ideal future society to replace the society of today. However, science fiction is written by real people in a specific space and time who often reflect the social tensions and issues of the time they were created. The depictions of humanoid androids, their position in society, and their desire to break free from their undignified or even slavish positions are, in many cases, a reflection of real policies and the position of today's "others" in mainstream society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Beginning with a little-studied scene linking H. G. Wells's 'A Misunderstood Artist' to Joris-Karl Huysmans's À Rebours , this essay argues that a shared gustatory paradox runs from Huysmanian decadence, through the theories of Edwin Lankester and Max Nordau and into Wells's writings. In each case, both a pragmatic and an aesthetic relationship to food can signify degeneration. The argument has three major stakes. The first is to reconstruct a robust intertextual relation between the oeuvres of Huysmans and Wells. The second is to complicate readings that cast two of Wells's scientific romances, The Time Machine and The War of the Worlds , as mouthpieces for imperialist or (pseudo)scientific discourses (Anger, Brantlinger, Budd, Gailor, Gregory, Hendershot, Pick). The third is to build on recent studies of food representation in nineteenth-century literature and propose a novel interpretive method (Cozzi, Gyman, Lee). Taking up William Greenslade's proposal that fictions construct a 'network of resistances' to discursive myths, I argue that gustatory scenes show Wells's 'network' operating in a curious way. They neither kowtow to degeneration nor assume Greenslade's active role of a 'critical, combative humanist'. Instead, they give contradictory depictions of moralized eating that play out the myth's structural paradox. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This is a work for collaborative poetry, the output of an ongoing creative engagement between myself and a specially trained version of the GPT-2[1] machine learning model. I then fine-tune the training of the generalized network with a more specific corpus - for this ongoing series of works I used a collection of science fiction and pop-science writing about artificial intelligence. For I Boundary Conditions i I consider life in pandemic lock-down: the boundaries of home, of time dilation, of relationships, and the boundaries of our digitally surveilled lives that birth these emerging artificial intelligences. [Extracted from the article]

Numbers appear to have limited value for literary study, since our discipline is usually more concerned with exploring differences of interpretation than with describing the objective features of literary works. But it may be time to reexamine the assumption that numbers are useful only for objective description. Machine learning algorithms are actually bad at being objective and rather good at absorbing human perspectives implicit in the evidence used to train them. To dramatize perspectival uses of machine learning, I train models of genre on groups of books categorized by historical actors who range from Edwardian advertisers to contemporary librarians. Comparing the perspectives implicit in their choices casts new light on received histories of genre. Scientific romance and science fiction—whose shifting names have often suggested a fractured history—turn out to be more stable across two centuries than the genre we call fantasy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Science fiction written and visual narratives already amount to a vast corpus, standing out as new representations of African contemporaneity (Bould, 2015) and pointing to a set of critical issues that appear to be relevant for (re)defining postcolonial poetics and aesthetics. Examining literary works as Cidade dos Espelhos (2011) by João Paulo Borges Coelho and Ualalapi by Ungulani Ba Ka Khosa (2016) through the critical framework of science fiction and speculative fiction, we aim to reflect on the aesthetics of memory and of, the future, framing these literary works as ways to renew the meaning of the "future of the past" (Koselleck, 2015) within the postcolony (Mbembe, 2000). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A biography of Flossie E. Hardart, a science fiction writer is presented. Topics include the visibility of her science fiction works in the 1930s and early 1940s discussing the number of women authors in science fiction during that time, views of Sarah Lefanu that women authors assumed a male voice and non-gender specific names to avoid prejudice on the part of editors and readers, and questioning of her question her identity and authorship due to one of her nonfiction article.

H.G. Wells is best known as "the father of science fiction". However, the bulk of his writing is both non-fiction and concerned with social justice. While it is widely held that The Rights of Man (1940) helped shape the drafting of the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, this article argues that Wells' influence extended well beyond this. Through his contribution to rights-based debates concerning social liberalism, internationalism, liberal internationalism, and international law, between the late 1890s and his death in 1946, Wells made crucial interventions in emerging discourses around rights and was a significant actor in rights-based civil society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Adolfo Bioy Casares's story "The Celestial Plot" (1948) is among the best known examples of Latin American science fiction writing of the early twentieth century inspired by contemporary advances in quantum physics. Most readings of the story focus on the movements of its main protagonist, Captain Ireneo Morris, as he traverses realities while test-flying a plane. This approach overlooks the role of the story's other protagonist, Dr. Carlos Servian, who, we argue, is the lynchpin upon which the multiple realities are dependent. We read the changes to Dr. Servian's character from a variety of scientific and philosophical perspectives on parallel universes. By addressing variations in Servian's character and language, and focusing on the disparate representations of the key objects in the story, we show how the story anticipates in some ways the Many Worlds notion which argues that reality bifurcates during quantum measurements, leading to near-identical copies of observers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The underwater of Sydney Harbour has its own histories, visual and literary representations, and narrators, but its contributions to Australian culture are yet to be fully recognised. Among European narrators were dress-divers whose technologies enabled access to an otherwise alien, inhuman world. This article discusses early dress diving in Sydney Harbour, focusing on an account by the explorer, Frank Hurley (1885–1962), of diving at Shark Island in 1921. Hurley's account is compared to the experiences of the harbour's professional dress-divers. His departures from reality are read as a science-fictionalisation of Sydney's submarine realm influenced by Jules Verne (1828–1905). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An introduction is presented which discusses various reports within the issue on topics including science fiction writing, the link between science fiction and the history of science, and future studies.

I argue for the importance of considering author, director, and producer Michael Crichton (1942–2008) as a critic and student of Cold War cultures of expertise. Though best known for his blockbuster fiction, he shared a sensibility with academics in North America and the United Kingdom who were concerned with scientists' unchecked authority. These scholars created a new field that would later become known as Science and Technology Studies or STS. Like his contemporaries in STS, and often in anticipation of them, Crichton's novels relied on a blend of history, sociology, and anthropology to lift back the curtain to reveal the specialized worlds in which scientists worked, and to devote specific attention to the practices, instruments, and values that animated their knowledge-production enterprise. In doing so, his fiction both popularized STS and shaped concerns and fears about the future of science and technology. The "speculative present" is useful for making visible the ironies exploited by Crichton, including his own engagement with ideas about speculation as both a form of conjecture and a form of prospecting value. Inspired by Donna Haraway's early work on the cyborg, the speculative present helps to pry open forms of world making obscured by adherence to binaries of fact and fiction, nature and culture, with the goal of cultivating a broader array of visions about emerging science and technology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Science fiction and popular science writing sometimes intersect—authors have written in both genres, and magazines have published their writing side by side. Producing "hard" science fiction depends on getting the known science right and ensuring that predictions seem plausible. There have even been claims that science fiction should be used to make science itself accessible to a wider public. This article uses case studies from mid-twentieth-century Britain to illustrate the range of attitudes adopted by authors and publishers who sought to associate the two genres and to probe the notion of "plausibility" in this context. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Kexue xiangsheng (science crosstalk) features comic dialogues aimed at popularizing knowledge in the physical and social sciences. This genre emerged in the late 1950s in the People's Republic of China (PRC) as part of a massive effort in the state-supervised culture industry to promote science. The genre shared many of the hallmarks of PRC instrumentalist science fiction, as both were based on a Soviet model. Authors and literary theorists like Guo Moruo, Ye Yonglie, and Gu Junzheng reiterated developmental narratives of socialism and of the power of science as a tool for mastery of nature developed by authors like Maxim Gorky and Mikhail Il'in. These works of socialist realism narrated transformations in the consciousness of their characters as they came to understand guiding principles of the world around them, including basic science, evolution, and dialectical materialism. Dramatic forms like kexue xiangsheng worked in concert with other socialist-realist representative modes, including popular performance, reportage, fiction, film, song, and reappropriations of premodern literary forms. In the process, notions of scientific thinking were conflated with political orthodoxy in promoting public health and political campaigns, and science was dismantled as a professional institution, shifting from a rationalized bureaucratic endeavor to grassroots efforts aimed at solving pragmatic problems. Through education in what I term the "quotidian utopian"—small health and hygiene measures that had the potential to ameliorate major health challenges—these popular science genres also straddled the line between Frederic Jameson's "Utopian form and Utopian wish," between what was part utopian text and part expression of the impulse to enact utopia through changes in policy and reconfigurations of the collective body. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the archiving activity of African American science fiction author Octavia E. Butler. Topics discussed include the contribution of Butler as an African American feminist theorist, researcher and historiographer, the histofuturist nature of her novels such as "Kindred" and "Wild Seed," and the influence of public libraries on the work and life of Butler as a writer.

An introduction is presented in which the editor discusses various topics in the issue including role of Mary Shelley's novel "Frankenstein" as first fictional response to climate change; Frankenstein's relationship to ethical reproductive science; and the novel "Frankenstein in Baghdad."

An introduction to a series of articles about the life and writing of African-American science fiction author Octavia E. Butler is presented.

The article examines the limitations of science fiction writing about aliens and the roles of aliens in the stories. Topics include the use of aliens as stand-ins for humans as a technique of bringing questions on human values, the notion of futuretypes within the alien science fiction genre and the argument that fictional narratives about aliens are actually written about humans.

Responding to David Zeitlyn's introduction, the paper considers implications of different conceptions or gamuts of time. Flows and connections between pasts and futures are considered in the light of Huw Price's work on the philosophy of time and by thinking seriously about how science fiction writers have considered the paradoxes of time travel. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents the author's views on being a Chicano science fiction writer from 1990 to 2015 and Chicano as a science fiction being. He states that he is the first Chicano to make a career authoring science fiction featuring Chicago characters and culture. Also discussed are the term Chicanonautica, several of his novels including "Cortez on Jupiter," and his originality.

The article offers information on scholars who have received the 2018 Mullen Fellowship on science fiction writing. It states that Mullen Fellowship offers stipends of up for the post-doctoral award and for the PhD award to support research at any archive that has science fiction holdings. Other topics include brief profiles of the fellows, such as Stina Attebery, is a PhD candidate at the University of California, Riverside; and Rhodri Davies is a PhD candidate at University of London.

The article discusses the release by Omniscriptum Publishing of a collection of short stories by Jewish American science fiction writer Leslie F. Stone in Germany. Topics include the themes of the short story collection, the relevance of the book to literary discussions and the questions of race, feminism, war and fascism in the 1930s, the cooperation of Stone's son Donald Silberberg in completing the collection, and how the author's interest in the work of Stone started.

The article provides historical information on Welshman author and editor Howell Davies and his friendship with author John Wyndham Parkes Lucas Beynon Harris. The three science fiction novels written by Davies under the pseudonym Andrew Marvell in 1939, which are "Minimum Man, or Time To Be Gone," "Three Men Make a World" and "Congratulate the Devil," and the influence of Davies on the writings of Harris, particularly "The Midwich Cuckoos" are discussed.

In Octavia E. Butler's novels Parable of the Sower and Parable of the Talents, teenager Lauren Olamina writes her own scripture, The Books of the Living, as a guide to a way of life she calls Earthseed. The Books of Bokonon, written by a self-styled holy man, provide Kurt Vonnegut's satirical Cat's Cradle with the often absurd tenets governing the invented religion of Bokononism. And in Dan Simmons' four-book Hyperion Cantos series, an eponymous epic poem penned by a misanthropic poet relates the "sacred history" of events leading humanity to a critical juncture. These creative works and their invented scriptures invite readers to immerse themselves in worldviews and value systems laid out along similar themes. Each considers possible outcomes of catastrophic crises, and comments realistically if despairingly on the nature of human failing. Each, in contrast, endorses the power of language to advance human thriving, and makes an ultimate virtue of simple human compassion and empathy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]