dissertation science fiction

Science Fiction & Fantasy: A Research Guide: Articles

• Reference Sources
• Biographical Sources
• New Acquisitions
• Primary Sources

Selected Article Databases

Scholarly and substantive articles on fantasy and science fiction have been appearing in academic journals with regularity since the 1970s. While there is no database exclusively devoted to indexing secondary work these genres, the sources listed below include articles published in academic journals centered on literary, film, and cultural studies.

Note that these resources generally do NOT index creative work in science fiction magazines (e.g., Strange Horizons, Interzone ) or material appearing in fanzines and other amateur publications.

The Library provides networked access to many more secondary source databases -- indexes and full-text -- than can be listed here. Others may be located through the Library Catalog and Databases .

• Academic Search Premier This multi-disciplinary database provides full text for more than 8,500 journals, including full text for more than 4,600 peer-reviewed titles. PDF backfiles to 1975 or further are available for well over one hundred journals, and searchable cited references are provided for more than 1,000 titles.
• America: History & Life America: History and Life (AHL) is a complete bibliographic reference to the history of the United States and Canada from prehistory to the present. Published since 1964, the database comprises over 530,000 bibliographic entries for periodicals dating back to 1954. Additional bibliographical entries are constantly added to the databases from editorial projects such as retrospective coverage of journals issues published prior to 1954.
• Annual Bibliography of English Language and Literature (ABELL) ABELL covers monographs, periodical articles, critical editions of literary works, scholarly book reviews, collections of essays and doctoral dissertations published anywhere in the world from 1920 onwards. All aspects and periods of English literature are covered, from Anglo-Saxon times to the present day. British, American and Commonwealth writing are all represented. Also accessible through Literature Online .
• FIAF International Index to Film Periodicals Contains over 500,000 article citations from more than 345 academic and popular film journals. Each entry consists of a full bibliographic description, an abstract and comprehensive headings (biographical names, film titles and general subjects). Coverage extends back to 1972.
• Film Literature Index Indexes 150 film and television periodicals from 30 countries cover-to-cover and 200 other periodicals selectively for articles on film and television. The periodicals range from the scholarly to the popular. More than 2,000 subject headings provide detailed analysis of the articles. The FLI Online contains approximately 700,000 citations to articles, film reviews and book reviews published between 1976-2001.
• Humanities International Index Indexes articles and books across the arts and humanities disciplines from a multitude of U.S. and international publications. HII also provides citations for original creative works including poems, fiction, photographs, paintings and illustrations. Many links to full text.
• Performing Arts Periodicals Database Formerly the International Index to the Performing Arts (IIPA) covers dance, film, television, drama, theater, stagecraft, musical theater, broadcast arts, circus performance, comedy, storytelling, opera, pantomime, puppetry, and magic. Full text from 1999 onward.
• JSTOR JSTOR is a fully-searchable database containing the back issues of several hundred scholarly journals in the humanities, social sciences, mathematics, music, ecology and botany, business, and other fields. It includes the following collections: Arts & sciences I, II and III, General science, Ecology and botany, Business, Language and literature.
• ProQuest One Literature Former name: Literature Online. Offers a full-text collection of poetry, drama, and prose with complementary references sources as well as articles, monographs and dissertations from the Annual bibliography of English language and literature (ABELL); full-text articles from literary journals; and biographical information on widely studied authors.
• MLA International Bibliography The premier scholarly bibliography covering languages, literatures, folklore, film and linguistics from all over the world. Online coverage back to 1926. Includes books, articles in books, and journal articles. Does not index book reviews.
• Periodicals Index Online Index to thousands of periodicals in the arts, humanities and social sciences across more than 300 years, covering each periodical from its first issue. Every article is indexed. The scope is international, including journals in English, French, German, Italian, Spanish and other languages. Previously known as Periodicals Contents Index (PCI).
• Project Muse Full text of scholarly journals in the humanities, social sciences, and mathematics. Covers such fields as literature and criticism, history, the visual and performing arts, cultural studies, and others.
• ProQuest Research Library ProQuest Research Library, formerly known as Periodical Abstracts, is a comprehensive database available through the ProQuest online system. It indexes and abstracts general interest magazines and scholarly journals in the social sciences, humanities and sciences. It comprises two components: a core list of periodicals covering about 800 publications, and 15 subject-specific modules that supplement the core list. Modules cover arts, business, children, education, general interest, health, humanities, international studies, law, military, multicultural studies, psychology, sciences, social sciences, and women's interests. Full text of many articles is provided.
• Science Fiction and Fantasy Research Database An on-line, searchable compilation and extension of Science Fiction and Fantasy Reference Index 1878-1985, Science Fiction and Fantasy Reference Index 1985-1991 , and Science Fiction and Fantasy Reference Index 1992-1995 (all by by Halbert W Hall), including material located since publication of the last printed volume. Based at Texas A&M.
• Web of Science Choosing "All Databases" allows you to search an index of journal articles, conference proceedings, data sets, and other resources in the sciences, social sciences, arts, and humanities.

Indexes/Bibliographies for Secondary Sources

Bibliographies are rich sources of citations to both journal articles and monographs. To locate these in the Library Catalogs, enter the word bibliography as a Subject term in conjunction with keywords such as fantasy, science fiction, gothic , Asimov , etc. A few general bibliographies appear below.

• Bibliographie der Utopie und Phantastik 1650-1950 im deutschen Sprachraum by Robert N. Bloch Call Number: Olin stacks PN6071 F25 B56 2002 Publication Date: 2002 Bibliography of German-language utopian and fantasy fiction, including translations into German from other languages.
• Ecrits sur la science-fiction : bibliographie analytique des études & essais sur la science-fiction publiés entre 1900 et 1987 : littérature, cinéma, illustration by Norbert Spehner Call Number: Library Annex Z5917 S36 S64x 1988 Publication Date: 1988 International bibliography of secondary works on science fiction (literature, film, art). Covers books, periodical & newspaper articles, and theses published between 1900 and 1987 in English, French, and other languages.
• Science fiction, fantasy, and horror reference : an annotated bibliography of works about literature and film by compiled by Keith L. Justice Call Number: Olin Reference Z5917 S36 J96 Publication Date: 1989 An annotated bibliography of 300 secondary works on science fiction and fantasy literature.
• Fanzine index : listing most fanzines from the beginning through 1952 : including titles, editors’ names, and data on each issue by Bob Pavlat and Bill Evans, editors. Call Number: Uris stacks Z5917 F3 P33 1965 + Publication Date: 1965

Academic SF/Fantasy Journals

The Library subscribes to several academic journals focusing on science fiction and fantasy. Here is a selection of currently received titles, as well as some freely available online:

Bulletin (Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America) - OLIN PS374.S25 S41 Extrapolation - OLIN PN3448.S45 E96 + ( online 1994 -) Femspec - online only Horror Studies - online and print: OLIN P96.H65 H67 Journal of Dracula Studies Journal of the fantastic in the arts - online and print set OLIN PN56.F34 J86 Mythlore online and in print - OLIN PR6039.O49 Z93+ Science fiction film and television - Science-fiction studies online and in print - OLIN PN3448.S45 S44 SFRA Review - freely accessible online from 2001; latest issue available 10 weeks after print publication) Studies in the Fantastic

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Science Fiction

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• Digital Scholarship

Science Fiction has long been the subject of serious research, and the databases below can help UT scholars find relevant monographs, peer-reviewed journals, and other scholarly resources.

Depending on your topic, you may need to search a variety of databases. The search tools linked below include articles published in academic journals centered on literary, film, and cultural studies. If you have questions about using these tools, contact Gina Bastone, the English Librarian: [email protected]

For more information on ebooks see the Ebook Guide

• The Science Fiction and Fantasy Research Database The Science Fiction and Fantasy Research Database is an online, searchable compilation and extension of Science Fiction and Fantasy Reference Index 1878-1985, Science Fiction and Fantasy Reference Index 1985-1991, and Science Fiction and Fantasy Reference Index 1992-1995, including material located since publication of the last printed volume. Most material was obtained and examined by the compiler; the remainder was verified in a reliable secondary source.
• The Internet Speculative Fiction Database A comprehensive bibliographic index of authors, publishers, novels, short stories, anthologies, magazines, and journals in science fiction and adjacent genres. Built as a wiki that anyone can contribute to. NOTE: This is not an index of scholarship/secondary sources on sci-fi works. It is a bibliography listing works by contributed authors.
• Extrapolation Publishes original research contributions to the critical study of science fiction and fantasy past and present, with occasional special issues on specific themes/topics.
• Foundation: The international review of science fiction A peer-reviewed journal from the UK's Science Fiction Foundation.
• Science Fiction Studies A key peer-reviewed journal of scholarship and literary criticism on science fiction and adjacent genres. Full issues online from 1973-2021. Most recent issues not available.
• Vector The peer-reviewed, critical journal of the British Science Fiction Association. Full issues online from 1958-2020.

• The SF Nexus: A Hub for Science Fiction Collections as Data A hub for the curation of science fiction digital collections and data sets. The current scope focuses on an ongoing project at Temple University's Scholars Studio to digitize and curate science fiction, with a particular emphasis on mid-century climate fiction.
• The Stuff of Science Fiction

Oxford Bibliographies Sci-Fi Spotlight

• Oxford Bibliographies - Science Fiction A selection of annotated bibliographic articles across the literature and cinema studies modules in Oxford Bibliographies. These articles have been made freely available and explore the growing scholarly area of Science Fiction. From Metropolis to The Matrix, and from Mary Shelley to Octavia Butler, this project aims to cover the major themes and works in the field, and will continue to grow in the coming years. These bibliographic articles are helpful if you want to find the major scholarship on a particular topic.

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Home > Graduate Research & Artistry > Theses & Dissertations > 6980

Graduate Research Theses & Dissertations

History in american new wave and hard renaissance science fiction.

Joseph Donaldson Follow

Publication Date

Document type.

Dissertation/Thesis

First Advisor

Gorman, David J.

Degree Name

Ph.D. (Doctor of Philosophy)

Legacy Department

Department of English

This dissertation examines the novels of American New Wave Science Fiction authors Philip K. Dick and Ursula K. Le Guin as well as the novels of American Hard Renaissance Science Fiction author Kim Stanley Robinson. This examination places the rhetoric of these three authors into the larger discourse in Science Fiction that metaphorically visualizes the physics of space-time, historiography, periodization, and narrative form. By crafting nonteleological arguments against hard determinism, Dick and Le Guin effect Robinson’s ahistorical perspectives celebrating human agency

Recommended Citation

Donaldson, Joseph, "History in American New Wave and Hard Renaissance Science Fiction" (2019). Graduate Research Theses & Dissertations . 6980. https://huskiecommons.lib.niu.edu/allgraduate-thesesdissertations/6980

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SFRA Review

Reviews, Articles, and Updates from the SFRA since 1971

China’s Pluralistic Studies of English Science Fiction: Doctoral Dissertations as Examples

⮌ SFRA Review , vol. 51, no. 2

Symposium: Chinese SF and the World

China’s Pluralistic Studies of English Science Fiction: Doctoral Dissertations as Examples

In globalized sf culture, sf in English has been dominant ever since the birth of modern sf in the 19 th century. As a popular genre, sf development relies heavily and inevitably upon the marketplace, where academic studies would help explore and establish the values obscured by commercial shrouds. In the field of English-language sf study, Chinese scholars have published numerous significant papers, many of which are extracted or extended from their doctoral dissertations, which have got or would be published in book form, constituting in turn the major part of the book publishing in this field. And in terms of academic strength, in China Master’s theses are incomparable to doctoral dissertations, due to their different program requirements. The brief review of this paper thus focuses on doctoral dissertations, together with relevant academic books, as they stand out not only as crystallization of existing relevant research interests, but representing the most comprehensive and highest level of standards.

Searching science fiction or sf as the keyword in the ChinaInfo (万方) thesis database, the results are 293 Master’s theses, 12 doctoral dissertations and 1 post-doctoral report from 2001 to 2019. The results of the same word as the subject in the CNKI (中国国家知识基础设施) thesis database show that, from 1992 to 2019 there are 641 Master’s theses and 45 doctoral dissertations. The results combining these two major academic engines are by no means complete, as studies in Hong Kong, Macao, and Taiwan are not included, and even in the mainland some dissertations choose non-disclosure for up to 5 years upon submission, which means they could only be accessed via university internal libraries. For these inadequacies  in statistics, the survey tries to compensate with the author’s knowledge. Generally, studies of English sf in China involve scholars not only of English literature, but also of Chinese, art, and history, presenting an overall picture of interdisciplinary study, and highlighting the increasingly widened academic attention to the genre.

Studies on SF Translation

Among the search results, many have low or no relevance to the subject. For example, the earliest result of doctoral dissertations is the one by Wang Hongqi (王宏起) in 2002, which is a study of Mikhail Bulgakov’s writing, just mentioning there is influence from H. G. Wells’ books. The earliest dissertation with high relevance appears in 2006, details as below: [1]

This debut is not overdue, as the first doctoral dissertation on Chinese sf by Wang Weiying (王卫英) is completed in the same year. And translation study is a proper beginning, as sf appears in China first as Western import in the early 20 th century. The dissertation takes a descriptive mode of translation studies, the main part including an introduction of the genre and its developmental phases in China, the case study of the translation of five sf stories, three being English, and their impact on the selection and translation of sf, and subsequently upon Chinese sf writing. The analysis centers on the socio-cultural, literary, and translation norms of different historical periods, confirming  the turn from linguistic to cultural approach in China’s translation studies since the late 1990s. During that period, some scholars have turned to the translation of Western popular fictions since the late Qing Dynasty and focused on the working of translation in the target culture, including Kong Huiyi (孔慧怡) from Hong Kong Chinese University, Yang Chengshu (杨承淑) from Fu Jen Catholic University, and Guo Jianzhong (郭建中) who has co-edited with James Gunn the Chinese six-volume The Road to Science Fiction (1997-1999) and published the monograph Translation of Popular Science Works and Science Fiction: Theory, Technique and Practice (2004). Guo is Jiang’s MA supervisor and one advisor of her Ph. D. dissertation.

Studies with Focus on SF Utopianism

As utopia, dystopia and anti-utopia are significant classic achievements in intellectual and literary history, quite a few dissertations have taken these angles to cut in sf studies, as listed below:

As Sargent identifies the three broad directions of utopianism as “utopian thought or philosophy, utopian literature, and the communitarian movements”(222), a lot of dissertations with the keyword utopia are theoretical studies of utopian philosophy, and even the literary study of Utopian Thought in Some British and American Fiction (2008) by Niu Hongying (牛红英) is actually a study of utopian thought in some classical non-sf writers, and thus they are not included in Table 2. Mai Jinghong’s dissertation, though included in the table, has weak relevancy to sf, as it interprets Morris’s work as a daily artistic theory.

Li Xiaoqing’s dissertation was completed several months earlier than Jiang Qian’s, but its focus is on establishing and sorting the British tradition of utopian literature, with no awareness of the overlapping and converging of sf and utopia. It mainly outlines the development and variation of this tradition, tracing its origin back to the ballad The Land of Cokeygne in the 14 th century, and including not only many proto- and modern sf works, but many classical works like William Black’s poetry, Philip Sidney’s pastoral romance, and William Shakespeare’s drama into the tradition. For the representative works of eutopia, dystopia, critical utopia, and female utopia, it offers brief interpretations mainly in terms of their historical contexts.  

Ou Xiangying’s dissertation takes the feminist utopian sf in Europe and America between 1950s and 1990s as its subject, and its method is an integration of literary criticism and cultural studies with a focus on political critique aided by content and form analysis. After expounding how the second wave of feminism influenced utopian writing, and how feminist utopias reformed sf tradition, it goes to a systematic account of significant feminist utopias in terms of single-sex worlds, two-sex worlds, and feminist dystopias, and then sums up the views of science and ethics, political design, and female subjectivity in those feminist utopias. 

Gu Shaoyang discusses some utopian and anti-utopian literature, but the differences are simply relegated to the abstract opposites of ideal and reality, freedom and bondage, good and evil. Tan Yanhong studies the environmental narratives of Oryx and Crake , The Year of Flood , The Hunger Games and Uglies , all published in the 21st century in the US and Canada, and her approach is more a literary criticism than Ou’s with one focus upon the point-of-view narratives in those “dystopias.” Tan generally regards dystopian fiction as a subgenre of sf, but she equals dystopia to anti-utopia. About the notoriously controversial disagreement over the uses of utopia, dystopia and anti-utopia, etc., under the umbrella term utopianism, Yu Yunling and especially Wang Yiping have made detailed clarifications based on discussions of some prominent utopia scholars like Lyman Sargent, Darko Suvin, and Krishan Kumar, which makes their argumentation more solid and forceful. They both follow the specific definitions of the several textual forms of the literary utopia made by Sargent in his famous “The Three Faces of Utopianism Revisited” (1994), and hold that literary anti-utopia is a parody of utopia, depicting a nightmare world with utopian agenda put into practice, while dystopia is not necessarily a negative extension of the previous utopia. Accordingly, Wang regards Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale as a dystopia, the same as Yu does, while classifying her Oryx and Crake , which Tan labels a dystopia, as an anti-utopia in the tradition set by Brave New World .

Wang Yiping’s dissertation aims to study anti-utopian literature as an independent tradition as she deems that in the 20 th century it has become the mainstream imagination of the future, replacing utopia with its alerting attitude to “social progress.” In order to establish such a tradition, she first expounds the transition from utopia to anti-utopia, and defines the responses to the scientific and high-tech world state by H. G. Wells as tide-turning, then goes on to explore the multi-development of the basic themes established in the early 20 th century. For literary studies as a whole, doctoral dissertations in China are usually combinations of historical, theoretical, and textual studies to different degrees, and the latter two approaches are foregrounded respectively by Wang’s and Yu Yunling’s dissertations. Wang finds that the anti-utopian writings are congruent with modern anti-utopian thought, and she draws upon the anti-utopian philosophy, political science and sociology of Karl Popper, F. A. Hayek, Isaiah Berlin, and J. L. Talmon for her fiction analysis. Yu Yunling focuses on the devices intended to achieve textual stability including allegories, authoritative text, monolithic text and patriarchal text, and the counteraction in the process of interpretation which ultimately leads to textual instability. Whilst Tan Yanhong makes use of narrative strategies in her textual analysis, Yu intends to explore some general narrative principles underlying utopian and dystopian writings, which is more narratology oriented. It is not accidental as Yu’s supervisor Qiao Guoqiang (乔国强) is a renowned scholar of narratology in China. 

Yu Yunling’s study represents one tendency in contemporary narratology studies, scholars in this field being increasingly interested in sf especially when addressing issues of postmodern narratives, world building, possible worlds, unnatural narratives and narratology itself. One example is David Wittenberg’s Time Travel: The Popular Philosophy of the Narrative (2012), which argues that time travel fiction can be viewed as “a narratological laboratory,” literalizing many of the basic theoretical questions of storytelling (2). Among many reviews of this book, the renowned sf scholar Adam Roberts made several harsh but pertinent criticisms, one of which is that “Whilst Wittenberg engages with a good spread of primary texts, his knowledge of the secondary criticism of science fiction is thin,” since he positions Bellamy’s Looking Backward as the first time travel fiction, born of Darwinistic prognostication of utopian romances, but his Darwinian thesis “relates less to the ‘utopian’ and rather more to the ‘scientific romance’ mode of the late century” (732-733). Insufficiency in comprehensive knowledge of sf and its criticism, if I might say so not without prejudice, is not uncommon in some narrative studies of sf, as most of their concerns fall ultimately on narrative norms or theories, which likely results in using SF texts as simple exemplifications for their argumentation as well. [2] But still, such studies would benefit sf studies by offering different perspectives. 

Studies with Focus on Science and Technology Narratives in SF

The third type of English SF studies highlights science and technology narratives, as the following table shows:

Mu Yunqiu’s dissertation holds that sf could be regarded as a part of scientific activities because of extraterrestrial exploration constantly involving interstellar fictions, some astronomers having authored sf works, and some astronomical theories containing imaginary content from the 17th to the early 20th century. The underlying position of re-establishing a new history of science based on cultural narratives, is expanded in her postdoctoral report The Study of Science Fiction in the Perspective of the History of Science (2012), which focuses on the narratives about Mars and the Moon, and sf works on the journal Nature . Mu’s cultural perspective of science comes from her supervisor Jiang Xiaoyuan (江晓原), who has published Are We Ready: Science in Fantasies and Reality (2007) and co-authored with Mu A New History of Science: A Study of Science Fiction (2016). In terms of sf study, they explore major themes through the lens of scientific discourse construction.

Yu Zemei’s dissertation argues that cyberpunk fiction is the convergence of SF writing in a postmodernist context and a theoretical turn to body concern. Its five chapters deal with two major issues, the postmodernist characteristics of cyberpunk fiction, and the ideological change of human subjectivity and selfhood brought about by the hybrid fusion of body and technology. Its merit and demerit are equally noticeable. It is a hard-edged study with an extensive literature review of the academic scholarship on cyberpunk. In 2012, Fang Fan (方凡) of Zhejiang University also published a literary study on cyberpunk titled American Postmodern Science Fiction , which is relatively weak in its theoretical grounding compared with Yu’s dissertation. But alongside Yu’s acute observations, there exist some mistakes of negligence. For example, she makes the inaccurate statements “Science Fiction is the genre of technological impact,” and “Body starts occupying increasingly important status in SF since the 1950s” without supportive argument or notes (2-3). 

Guo Wen’s dissertation is quite lucid in language and thinking. She has noticed science and technology has changed the traditional definition of the human, but unlikeYu Zemei focusing on posthumanism and cyborgism, she is mainly concerned with the ethical reflections of technological alienation and human materialization in 16 sf works on cloning from Europe, America and Asia, including Never Let Me Go , Cloud Atlas , Brave New World , etc.. After elucidating the relationship and influence between the development of biotechnology, genetic engineering, and sf writing, her dissertation addresses three ethical situations: individual clones’  copy-of-the-origin status, group of human cloning with individual clones reduced to simulacra and signs, and the failure of utopias of human cloning to solve technological and ecological crises. Her main methodology is “ethical literary criticism”, a paradigm of literary criticism grounded in Western ethical criticism and Chinese moral criticism, first proposed by her doctoral supervisor Nie Zhenzhao (聂珍钊) in 2004. Recently Liu Xiaohua (刘晓华) of Cangzhou Normal University, has published Science and Technology Ethics in Anglo-American Science Fiction (2019), which discusses ethical problems in sf depictions of life intervention, cloning, cyberspace, robots, cyborgs, and the environment, on a much broader scale. 

Studies on Individual SF Writers

The fourth type of studies is on sf writings of individual writers. Among the search results, quite a few studies on George Orwell, William Golding, Kurt Vonnegut, Doris Lessing and Margaret Atwood are not relevant to their sf writings. The below table shows the studies of high relevance to sf:

Studies on individual sf writers start with Ursula K. Le Guin, who has contributed admirably to the genre development, and who, far from denying connection to sf by some writers of similar literary prestige like Vonnegut and Atwood, had a deep sense of identification with the genre. In 1981, “The Dairy of the Rose” (1976) is translated in the namesake collection of sf short stories, and in 1982, an sf introductory anthology translated from the 1978 Japanese original includes introductions to the Earthsea trilogy and The Left Hand of Darkness . [3] During the 1990s, translations of her short stories and novel excerpts appear in the magazine Science Fiction World (《科幻世界》). The first full-length translations of her novels are in mainland China the Earthsea stories in Jan. 2004, and in Taiwan The Left Hand of Darkness Dec. 2004. Le Guin starts to attract academic attention in the late 1990s. Ye Dong’s doctoral supervisor Yang Renjing (杨仁敬) includes sf into classic literary history in A History of Twentieth-Century American Literature (1999), and offers a special part on Le Guin in the co-authored A Concise History of American Literature (2008) (Ye 16-17) .

Ye Dong and Liu Jing both take some sf and fantasy stories of Le Guin as their subjects, though Liu’s title calls it sf inaccurately. Both hold the basic claim that Taoism constitutes one constant influence on Le Guin’s thought and writing, and she is unique in using distinctly Western art forms to communicate primary tenets of Taoism, such as Non-action (无为)，Mutual Generation (相生), Balance (均衡), Yin and Yang(阴阳). Liu discusses representations of Taoist influence from man-nature relation, political ideology, and individual life value, whilst Ye from gender relation, social collective relation, and human-nature relationship. Two out of three their discussions roughly overlap in terms of perspectives, but Ye Dong argues with more clarity and force, in that she consciously discusses Taoist influence in interaction with feminist sf, utopianism, and ecocriticism. And to further fortify her proposal, she adds a chapter on Le Guin’s translation of Tao Te Ching (《道德经》) against the background of the Western understanding of Taoism. 

Wang Shouren (王守仁), Cheng Jing’s doctoral supervisor, devotes a chapter to elucidate the contemporary development of popular literature such as western fiction, crime fiction, sf, and high-tech thriller in The New History of American Literature Vol. 4 (2002), where he mentions that Le Guin is one representative of the  New Wave Movement. This might be one reason for Cheng Jing to choose the subject, since research subjects usually have to be permitted or supported by supervisors. Compared with Ye Dong and Liu Jing, Cheng Jing limits her study to Le Guin’s sf writings, and proposes that Le Guin opposes techno-determinism, technophobia or misuse of technology and advocates for a Taoist deference to the natural development of technology. 

Doris Lessing is introduced and translated in China as early as in the 1950s, with full translations of Hunger (1953), The Grass is Singing (1950) and A Home for the Highland Cattle (1953) published respectively in 1955, 1956 and 1958, and academic study mainly starts in the early 1980s (Wang 172). There are 20 doctoral dissertations or so on her writings since 2005. 

All three in Table 4 focus on Lessing’s five space fictions. Tao Shuqin thinks, somewhat simplistically, that Lessing claims colonization as the real drive of and path to civilization, and the genre “Space Fiction” itself is also a failure, since historical narrative, critical realism, and science fiction are contradictory to one another. Zhang Qi also takes postcolonialism as her major approach, and interprets Lessing’s depiction of the colonial, the female and the diasporic Other as profound revealing of identity crises, which are influenced by her traumatic family experience, life in Africa and identification with Marxism. As she discovers, Lessing’s attention to S&T, her reading of sf works, and conscious adapting sf for social criticism, would explain why she writes those space fictions (180-181).

Generally, Zhang Qi reads those space stories mainly as reflections of power operation in politics, military affairs and culture in the 20 th century, and this implicit interpretation strategy is clarified and defined by Yin Bei as allegorical metaphors, a position foregrounding and also conforming  the thought-experiment features of Lessing’s space fictions especially compared with her earlier writings. Yin Bei focuses on Lessing’s innovative use of sf for cultural and philosophical pondering over the historical interaction of language, cognition and reality, and accordingly she draws on the conceptual metaphor theories proposed by George Lakoff and others. Yin Bei goes deep to explore Lessing’s sophisticated thought-experiments. For example, after examining the two metaphoric paradigms on morality of “The Strict Father Model” and “The Nurturant Parent Model” in Chapter Three, she goes on in Chapter Four to analyze two overlapping but different rationalist ethical views derived from the first paradigm, namely, the Lamarckian Evolutionary Metaphor and the Social Darwinistic Evolution Metaphor. And she concludes that Lessing has revealed  some metaphoric paradigms once derived from concrete life experiences have become entrenched in subconsciousness and cultural norms.

Graduating together with Yin Bei, Li Chan mainly studies H. G. Wells’s sf  against the contemporary culture and the sf tradition. Her dissertation is built up on the basis of Wellsian studies, Western Marxist sf criticism, and literature and science studies, with the main body addressing the evolutionary imaginations in Wells’s sf, the historical isomorphic imaginations of anthropology and Wells’s sf, the two-dimensional depiction of the machines as the symbol of technology and that of mechanism, and the cultural development of Well’s dynamic utopia and its failure. One merit of her dissertation is that the textual analysis is embedded in the discussion of (pseudo-)scientific and cultural construction of evolution discourses and their transmutation into a diachronic model of progress.

Theoretical Studies of Sf

The fifth type is theoretical studies of or related to sf, with two dissertations as listed below:

Ran Dan’s research is a philosophical study, and it is included here as it could help to  understand  the broad context of related discussions. Ran thinks cyborgism has become one of the most influential cultural thoughts in Western academic circles, and it enters the field of posthumanism with its breaking of dualism and challenging of the ontological purity of human subject. The main body discusses the theories of Andrew Pickering, Donna Haraway, and N. Catherine Hayles with an attempt to establish an internal logical connection among them. He Xinye focuses solely on the sf poetics of Darko Suvin, as she finds Suvin is widely referred to but in China there is no in-depth and systematic expounding of his theories. Actually the first chapter of Li Chan’s dissertation interpretes three key concepts of Western Marxist SF study, namely, utopia, estrangement, and cognition, for which Suvin is the cardinal representative. Li’s discussion doesn’t enter He’s investigation, because, as explained earlier, the author chooses non-disclosure. One chapter might be sufficient for the study of Suvin’s theories in relation to sf writing, but it needs a full dissertation to establish its position in the related theoretical history. For example, one section of He’s dissertation is on Suvin’s continuation and development of the classical Marxist concept of cognition, truth and practice. 

In the aspect of theoretical study, Wu Yan (吴岩) has made significant contributions in spite of the fact that  his major concern is Chinese sf. Under his national research project, he has organized the translation of sf theories by Suvin, Brian Aldiss, and Isaac Asimov, and published Literary Theories and Discipline Construction of Science Fiction (2008) and An Outline Study of Science Fiction (2011). The first book offers a comprehensive review of basic theories, critical perspectives and practices, teaching methods and resources of sf study, and the second studies major sf groups of different identities and argues the genre’s legitimacy arises from its cultural marginality.

In this brief survey of doctoral dissertations and related books on English sf in China, we can find the overall research evolves with increasing force. With profound and innovative studies along with some mistakes and limits, what could be strengthened, in the author’s view, is first studies of more significant sf writers. The present studies all engage in those writers canonized in mainstream literary history, but it will take time to expand the scope. Secondly, sf narratives of S&T could be further explored based on more pertinent  theoretical study. For in the contemporary techno-scientific world, S&T is no longer restricted to laboratories or factories, but in Bruce Sterling’s words, pervasive and utterly intimate (xiii), and sf is almost the only genre of abiding interest in S&T embedded in value-loaded social life. Besides, with such studies, the academic stereotype of sf as minor and idiosyncratic might get dispelled.

Academic study is never independent of its institutionalization, as shown here by how Jiang Qian, Yu Yunling, Mu Yunqiu, Guo Wen, Ye Dong and Cheng Jing were guided or inspired by their supervisors in their writing. Most of the doctors discussed in the paper have gained the positions of associate professor or professor at universities, and are supervising graduate students now. With years of intensive research on sf for their dissertations, they have laid a sound foundation in the field and most probably developed genuine devotion to the genre. With these advantages, a promising future of study might be reasonably expected.

[1] For the dissertations and books discussed, I follow their original English titles or translate the Chinese when there are no English ones.

[2] Another typical example is Jan Alber’s Unnatural Narrative: Impossible Worlds in Fiction and Drama (2016). According to Alber, the unnatural narrative in sf becomes “a bona fide concern,” different from the postmodernist “illusion-breaking” unnatural narrative, and the conventionalized sf impossibilities could be explained “through technological progress or simply by associating them with a potential future.” See Jan Alber. Unnatural Narrative: Impossible Worlds in Fiction and Drama . University of Nebraska Press, 2016, pp. 42-43, p. 107.

[3] See Shao Bo (邵柏) and Fu Shen (符申) eds. Meigui Riji 玫瑰日记 [ The Diary of Rose ]. Chongqing Branch of Science and Technology Literature Press, 1981, pp.1-30; Takashi Ishikawa, Norio Ito eds. Shijie zhuming kexue huanxiang xiaoshuo xuanjie 世界著名科学幻想小说选介 [ An Introductory Anthology of World’s Science Fantasy Masterpieces ]. Trans. Gao Qiming (高启明), Pan Liben (潘力本), Wang Lian’an (王连安), Shan Yang (山杨), Su Zhengxu (苏正绪), Jilin People’s Press, 1982, pp. 204-208, pp.341-345. This information is gained from Wang Wen (王文), a big sf fan, who is currently building a comprehensive Chinese sf database.

WORKS CITED

Roberts, Adam. “ Time Travel: The Popular Philosophy of the Narrative .” Textual Practice , vol. 28, no. 4, 2014, pp. 730-734.

Sargent, Lyman Tower. “The Three Faces of Utopianism.” Minnesota Review , vol.7, no. 4, 1967, pp. 222-230.

Sterling, Bruce. “Preface.” Mirrorshades: The Cyberpunk Anthology , edited by Bruce Sterling, Ace Books, 1986. 

Wang, Jiaqi (王嘉琦). Duolisi laixin zuopin de fanyi ji yanjiu zongshu多丽丝·莱辛作品的翻译及研究综述 [“A Brief Review of Translation and Research of Doris Lessing”]. Heilongjiang shizhi [《黑龙江史志》], no. 21, 2013, pp. 172-173.

Wittenberg, David. Time Travel: The Popular Philosophy of the Narrative . Fordham University Press, 2012.

Ye, Dong. Ursula K. Le Guin’s Quest for Tao in Her Science Fiction and Fantasy World . Xiamen University Press, 2017.

Yu, Zemei (余泽梅). Saibopengke kehuan wenhua yanjiu—yi shenti wei shijiao 赛博朋克科幻文化研究——以身体为视角 [“ The Culture of Cyberpunk Science Fiction—A Study from the Perspective of Body ”]. Diss., Sichuan University, 2011.

Zhang, Qi (张琪). Lun duolisi laixin taikong xiaoshuo zhong de wenhua shenfen tanxun论多丽丝·莱辛太空小说中的文化身份探寻 [“ On Cultural Identity in Doris Lessing’s Space Fictions ”]. Diss., Xiangtan University, 2014.

Li Chan , Ph. D. of English language and literature, associate professor at College of Foreign Languages and Cultures of Sichuan University, China. Her research interests include modern and contemporary literature, literary theories and sf study. She has published “The Utopian Vision of the Marxist Science Fiction Criticism” (2013), “On the Characteristics of the Unnatural Narrative in Science Fiction” (2018), Estranged Cognition: A Study of H. G. Wells’s Science Fiction (2019), and “The Rise of Techno-culture Criticism in SF Theories” (2021). 

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Four Stories of Fantasy and Science Fiction

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This thesis contains four stories of fantasy and science fiction. Four story lengths are represented: the short short ("Dragon Lovers"), the shorter short story ("Homecoming"), the longer short story ("Shadow Mistress"), and the novel ("Sword of Albruch," excerpted here).

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iii, 73 leaves

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Drolet, Cynthia L. (Cynthia Lea) May 1988.

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• Drolet, Cynthia L. (Cynthia Lea)
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• North Texas State University Place of Publication: Denton, Texas

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• Department: Graduate Studies in English
• Discipline: English
• Level: Master's
• Name: Master of Arts
• PublicationType: Master's Thesis
• Grantor: North Texas State University
• Dragon Lovers
• Shadow Mistress
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Drolet, Cynthia L. (Cynthia Lea). Four Stories of Fantasy and Science Fiction , thesis , May 1988; Denton, Texas . ( https://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc500548/ : accessed August 18, 2024 ), University of North Texas Libraries, UNT Digital Library, https://digital.library.unt.edu ; .

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Post-utopian science fiction in postmodern american and russian literatures public deposited.

This dissertation examines how the new modality of science fiction—post-utopia—incorporates two seemingly opposite discourses, utopian and dystopian, and how an oscillation between these discourses is manifested in the twentieth/twenty-first century American and Russian science fiction. While the simultaneous presence and vacillation between the utopian and dystopian discourses is evident in all the texts, some gravitate more toward the utopian pole, while others favor the dystopian. What my analysis reveals is that American novels exhibit a predisposition towards utopian visions, while their Russian counterparts largely give preference to the dystopian ones. Specifically, in chapter two, which focuses on the analysis of the American steampunk novel The Difference Engine (1990) by William Gibson and Bruce Sterling and the Russian text The Blizzard (2010) by Vladimir Sorokin, we are presented with two opposing views on the representation of history: one (utopian), exhibited by the American narrative, envisions history as flexible, while the other (dystopian), exemplified by the Russian text, sees history as unable to receive change. Chapter three, by analyzing the cyberpunk genre through William Gibson’s Neuromancer (1984) and the Russian texts by Victor Pelevin Homo Zapiens (1999), S.N.U.F.F. (2011) and Anna Starobinets’s The Living (2012), demonstrates contrasting attitudes toward the conception of cyberspace. While Gibson, highlighting the detrimental effects of the emerging cybertechnologies, nonetheless acknowledges the utopianism of the technological progress, Pelevin and Starobinets primarily present technology as oppressive means for human manipulation. In chapter four, which discusses the exemplars of the post-apocalyptic genre—Walter Miller’s A Canticle for Leibowitz (1959) as an American representative, and Georgii Daneliia’s Kin-Dza-Dza! (1986) and Dmitry Glukhovsky’s Metro 2033 (2005) as its Russian counterparts—dichotomous views on the dialectic of the sacred and the profane are exposed. Utopianism here is exemplified through Miller’s novel, which roots its post-apocalyptic setting in a revived mythical time, hoping to attain the sacred. Russian narratives, by portraying an evident disenchantment with the sacred, envision their “after the end” scenarios in a mostly dystopian light. Overall, this dissertation proposes that post-utopian SF reflects the larger tendencies in the postmodernist movement, which has been experiencing a revival of modernist ideals.

• Gerhard, Julia
• Comparative Literature
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The role of concept art in science fiction films: a study of the process and creation of environment concept art.

Ruochen Liu , Syracuse University

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Master of Fine Arts (MFA)

Robert C. Dacey

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Juan Juarez

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Arts and Humanities

Successful science fiction films have excellent concept art that integrates all the fantasy elements into a clear visual style, including characters, environments and various props. The aim of this thesis is to discuss concept art in science fiction films.

The first part of the thesis introduces myself at different periods in my creative development and the reason that I’m interested in film and choosing concept art for my professional direction. The primary purpose of this thesis concerns my creative processes and inspirations, in designing and illustrating environments for a science fiction story of my own creation. The thesis also investigates the utilization of environment concept art on Science Fiction films in three aspects: film color keynote, camera angle and visual effects. Through these three aspects the thesis studies three typical science fiction films.

In conclusion, the thesis shows how the background of films, games or animations, a like character’s personalities. The artwork component of this thesis is a series of background concept art, based on the studies of existing science fiction films and concept art. The final point of the thesis is to propose professional opportunities that would allow me to explore the interests outlined here.

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• Afrofuturism, science fiction, and the reinvention of African American culture

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• Kim, Myungsung (Author)
• Lockard, Joe (Thesis advisor)
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• Holbo, Christine (Committee member)
• Arizona State University (Publisher)
• American Literature
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• Black Science Fiction
• Cybernetics
• Posthumanism
• Science Fiction
• Future, The, in literature
• Technology in literature
• African American authors
• African Americans in popular culture
• Civilization, Western--African influences.
• thesis Partial requirement for: Ph.D., Arizona State University, 2017
• bibliography Includes bibliographical references (pages 218-236)
• Field of study: English

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The Posthuman in Contemporary Black African Diasporic Science Fiction

--> Wilby, Liam Harry (2021) The Posthuman in Contemporary Black African Diasporic Science Fiction. PhD thesis, University of Leeds.

My thesis investigates narrative theorisations of the posthuman in fictions by three Black African diasporic science fiction writers: Nalo Hopkinson’s Brown Girl in the Ring (1998) and Midnight Robber (2000); Nnedi Okorafor’s Binti trilogy (Binti, 2015, Binti: Home, 2017 and Binti: The Night Masquerade, 2018); and Anthony Joseph’s The African Origins of UFOs (2008). I outline how these six texts contribute to and, importantly, disrupt critical posthumanism’s reconfiguration of liberal humanism’s conception of ‘the human’. In dialogue with Black feminist scholarship by those such as Zakiyyah Iman Jackson, Katherine McKittrick, Christina Sharpe and Sylvia Wynter, the thesis explores how fictional narratives can be employed to denaturalise the hegemonic conception of Western Man, which continues to rest on the ontological negation of Black life. I describe the three writers discussed as continuing and extending a legacy of work by Black scholars and artists who, positioned as abject within Western modernity, have always disrupted the epistemic tenets of Man. I also situate these texts within scholarship on the ‘new animism’ (Laack, 2020) in order to highlight how tenets of African and African diasporic epistemologies and cultures exist as possible alternative genealogies for critical posthumanist discourses, which can disrupt the Euro-Western and white-centric tendencies that currently dominate the discipline. Hopkinson, Okorafor and Joseph’s writing, as well as the Black intellectual tradition drawn on throughout the thesis, inhabit ‘demonic grounds’ (Wynter, 1989; McKittrick, 2006) within critical posthumanism: absent presences that disrupt and transform tenets of the disciplines’ prevailing scholarship, ultimately reshaping conceptions of the posthuman.

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Imagining the Anthropocene: science fiction cinema in an era of climatic change

Neilson, Toby (2020) Imagining the Anthropocene: science fiction cinema in an era of climatic change. PhD thesis, University of Glasgow.

This thesis explores contemporary science fiction cinema through the concept of the Anthropocene. The literature review suggests that science fiction film studies doesn’t engage with ecological concerns as much as it could, that ecocinema studies tends to ignore the genre, and that the broader field of the environmental humanities similarly overlooks the genre’s uses. By bringing science fiction cinema into conversation with emergent Anthropocene debates, it makes useful contributions to science fiction film studies, ecocinematic understanding and the wider environmental humanities field. This thesis is split in two. Part one suggests a trend within a number of science fiction films of the 21st century, which are shown to respond to the ecological concerns of this era marked by rapid environmental change. Chapters two and three in particular are concerned with showcasing how legacy forms of representation in the genre undergo Anthropocene-inflected alterations. These chapters showcase a movement from technological to ecological concern in a selection of contemporary science fiction films. Beyond demarcating this shift towards the ecological that’s being borne out in the genre, this thesis also suggests science fiction cinema as a uniquely placed framework for mediating and experiencing certain aspects of this era. In part two, comprising chapters four and five, this thesis argues for the importance of science fiction films in lending aesthetic and experiential consideration to the dwarfing nonhuman timescales and objects that pervade human experience in the Anthropocene. Through an analysis of the representation of time and planets across a range of films, this thesis argues for the uses and importance of the genre in wider ecocritical discourse and understanding.

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Worldbuilding in Science Fiction, Foresight and Design

* Web Text version of each JFS paper here is for easy reading purpose only, for the valid and published context of each article, please refer to the PDF version. 

Journal of Futures Studies, June 2019, 23(4): 15–26

Leah Zaidi, Independent Scholar, Canada

Science fiction is experiencing a renaissance as the rate of change and uncertainty about the future increases. Organizations, innovators, and changemakers alike are turning to the genre to navigate the future and design for the present, often unaware that generating and using images of the future for strategic purposes is a cornerstone of foresight practice. A fundamental concept in science fiction that is fueling the use of the genre as a strategic tool is worldbuilding. This paper explores how worldbuilding is currently leveraged, how it relates to design and foresight, and how it might further enrich both disciplines. It will propose that design and foresight may benefit from the worldbuilding processes of science fiction authors to design for coherence, user-test worlds, and help society develop a superstructure of culture in order to imagine and create new visions of the future.

Keywords: Design, Science Fiction, Social Foresight, Worldbuilding.

Introduction

Stories are powerful. A story “can be a way for humans to feel that we have control over the world. They allow people to see patterns where there is chaos, meaning where there is randomness. Humans are inclined to see narratives where there are none because they can afford meaning to our lives — a form of existential problem-solving” (Delistraty, 2014). Creating fiction — our ability to envision possibilities outside of our immediate reality — has served as an evolutionary advantage for our species. Historian Yuval Noah Harari argues that it is our propensity to create and perpetuate mass mythologies that defines humanity and our dominion over reality (Harari, 2015).

Often, stories have the power to change us on a fundamental level because our brains process moral lessons coded in narratives differently. Researchers have found that “narratives that appeal to ‘protected values’, including core personal, national, or religious values, may be particularly effective at influencing receivers. Protected values resist compromise and are tied with identity, affective value, moral decision-making, and other aspects of social cognition” (Kaplan et al., 2017, p. 1). When we encounter moral lessons in the form of a narrative, our brains show increased activity, and we engage more deeply than we would otherwise.

From Mary Shelley to Robert A. Heinlein to William Gibson, science fiction has provided the world with stories about the future. Science fiction is, in the broadest sense, fiction that follows science. It depicts “plausible futures — envisioning where contemporary social trends and recent breakthroughs in science and technology might lead us” (Gunn, 2014). It is a sociology of the future (Toffler, 1970, p. 208). A vast and varied genre, science fiction is a subset of speculative fiction — a super-category that embraces alternative realities (Oziewicz, 2017). 1

Science fiction is experiencing a renaissance as the rate of change accelerates, and we grow more uncertain about the future. Organizations, innovators, leaders, and changemakers are turning to the genre to navigate the future and design for the present, perhaps unaware that generating and using images of the future for strategic purposes is a cornerstone of foresight practice. In particular, the concept of worldbuilding in science fiction may offer new insights at the intersection of foresight and design that may strengthen the growing bond between them. This paper will explore how science fiction is currently impacting real-world design, how worldbuilding overlaps with foresight and design, and how worldbuilding in science fiction might further enrich both practices.

The Application of Science Fiction

Science fiction holds significant influence over technological innovation and scientific research. For instance, Jules Verne inspired the U.S. Navy’s first submarines and the modern helicopter (Tavakoli-Far, 2013). It was Arthur C. Clarke who first proposed using satellites for global communications in 1945 (Tweney, 2011). Everything from the desire to visit “Mars to flying cars to digital drugs, robot friends to teleportation, GPS to mobile communicators, smart food to mitochondrial reproduction techniques,” has roots in science fiction (Bassett, Steinmueller, & Voss, 2013). The multitude of examples demonstrate that “science fiction and science ‘fact’ — science and technology innovation, policy, public knowledge, investment — are not two separate realities but are two entangled and overlapping fields” (p. 1).

However, science fiction is more than a technophilic wellspring. Good science fiction presents “a fully realized, multidimensional vision, including not only the technological and scientific, but the psychological, cultural, moral, social, and environmental dimensions of future human existence. The real future will be an interactive synthesis of all these dimensions” (Lombardo, 2018, p. 3).

During the American Civil Rights movements, Martin Luther King Jr. encouraged Nichelle Nichols to remain in her role as Lieutenant Uhura on Star Trek though she had considered leaving. To King, Star Trek and Nichols represented a brighter world with a more progressive social system — a vision of the future for the Civil Rights Movement, in which a black woman was judged solely on the content of her character. Later, Nichols was instrumental in reforming NASA’s hiring policy, and the recruitment of Sally Ride and Guion Bluford, NASA’s first female and first black American astronauts respectively (Klus, 2017).

Recently, organizers and activists wrote an anthology of “visionary science fiction and speculative fiction”, titled Octavia’s Brood: Science Fiction Stories from Social Justice Movements . Paying homage to author Octavia Butler, they aspire to create “‘visionary fiction’ and movements for social change through short stories”. They believe science fiction “pulls from real life experience, inequalities and movement building to create innovative ways of understanding the world around us, paint[s]visions of new worlds that could be, and teach[es]us new ways of interacting with one another” (Brown & Imarisha, 2015).

In this context, science fiction empowers marginalized voices, fosters equal representation, and challenges entrenched orthodoxies and concepts of ‘the other’. The work of minorities and women has gained prominence and recognition in recent years, helping diversify the value systems depicted (owing partly to democratic reform at The Hugo Awards) (Liptak, 2017). As marginalized voices bring alternative perspectives to the genre, the perception of science fiction may shift from a plot-driven, artifact-centric genre to a socially conscious, value-centric one.

The idea that science fiction can inform the design of a better tomorrow is becoming a movement. Recent initiatives such as Project Hieroglyph and The Verge’s Better Worlds both offered positive images of the future to inspire a better world (Konstantinou, 2019). They encapsulate the same spirit as Ray Bradbury’s The Toynbee Convector which posits that if someone shows us a brighter future and maps the path to it, we will all rush towards that outcome (Bradbury, 1984). Since positive images of the future are “one of the main instruments of culture, providing both a vision of civilization and the tools for realizing it”, the inclination to use science fiction in this manner should come as no surprise (Polak, 1973, p. 13).

In stark contrast, Russia uses science fiction as a political weapon of war. Vladislav Surkov — a “political technologist” and “Putin’s grey cardinal” — allegedly writes science fiction under the pseudonym Natan Dubovitsky (Pomerantsev, 2014). Commentators pore over his dystopian visions of a non-linear war in order to understand the Kremlin’s vision for Russia (Komska, 2014). Surkov combined his background in public relations with his love of theatre and science fiction into a “strategy of power based on keeping any opposition . . . constantly confused, a ceaseless shape-shifting that is unstoppable because it’s indefinable” (Pomerantsev, 2011).

These examples demonstrate that science fiction offers an opportunity to imagine and prototype complex socio-economic and political systems of the future, and the reinforcing relationship people have with those systems (for better or worse). The genre will likely gain popularity as more real-world uses emerge.

An Entangled Relationship

At present, “the divide between science fiction and futures studies is neither necessary nor desirable. There is a long history of crossover between the two, with each positively influencing the other” (von Stackelberg & McDowell, 2015, p. 29). It was author H.G. Wells who first called for professors of foresight in 1932 (Wells in Slaughter, 1989, pp. 3-4). Thirty-one years later, Arthur C. Clarke stated that “a critical . . . reading of science fiction is essential training for anyone wishing to look more than ten years ahead” (Clarke, 1963). Both Wells and Clarke, “frequently and successfully crossed back and forth from science fiction and futures studies” (von Stackelberg & McDowell, 2015, p. 29).

Similarly, design and foresight reinforce each other. Whether we are designing products, policies, or services, time passes during the process, from the moment we identify a problem to the moment we implement a solution. In that sense, all design is for the future.

In The Futures of Everyday Life , Stuart Candy states that,

Futures can lend design a richer temporal context and big-picture meaning-making… Design lends futures solidity, communicative as well as exploratory effectiveness…a direct interface to materiality, a place to begin pursuit of preferred futures in the concrete. Together, they provide the tools of a more complex and yet more intuitive exploration of possibilities, with the ‘theory objects’ of futures — which scenarios have always been — now assuming irresistibly tangible forms (2010, p. 207).

In science fiction, the overlap between foresight and design distils into a single concept deemed “the lifeblood of storytelling”: worldbuilding (Anders, 2013).

Worldbuilding

Worldbuilding is the process of constructing a complete and plausible imaginary world that serves as a context for a story. It is “the creation of imaginary worlds with coherent geographic, social, cultural, and other features” (von Stackelberg & McDowell, 2015, p. 32). Worlds “provide detailed contextual rule sets that develop a larger reality that extends beyond a single story, while potentially providing a deeper understanding of the underlying systems that drive these worlds” (pp. 25-26). All stories require some worldbuilding, whether the story takes place in Rome in 500 B.C., or modern-day Tokyo, or in a galaxy far, far away.

Worldbuilding in science fiction can forge a stronger relationship between foresight and design because it is a form of social constructivism and systemic design. Similar to how our socio-ecological systems are emergent, co-evolved and “interlinked in never-ending adaptive cycles of growth, accumulation, [and]restructuring,” science fiction worlds instil a sense of completeness (Holling, 2001, p. 392). For example, Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars trilogy begins with “humanity’s efforts to colonize our cosmic neighbor in Red Mars, and closes two centuries later in Blue Mars” having fully explored his “musings on science, politics, economics and religion” over hundreds of pages (Walter, 2016).

Heinlein’s The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress , Ursula Le Guin’s Hainish series, and Samuel Delany’s Nova are other examples of both science fiction and systems fiction because they attempt to portray how an entire society works rather than a fragment of it (Walter, 2016). Subgenres of science fiction such as climate fiction — which “explores the potential, drastic consequences of climate change” or alternative climates — also leverage systems-thinking 2 (Ullrich, 2015).

Worldbuilding is also an understudied act of intentional design. Raven and Elahi state that “little or no literature exists which applies the strategies and logics of narrative as understood by writers, cineastes and cultural scholars to the methods deployed by futures scholars and practitioners in the creation of their final outputs” (2015 p. 49). Moreover, because narratives are processed differently than other forms of information, leveraging storytelling and worldbuilding may allow us to challenge societal values without antagonizing protected values.

Worldbuilding, Foresight, and Design

The concept of worldbuilding is embedded within foresight and design practices, albeit to a different extent than it is in science fiction. Notable examples at this intersection include scenario generation, science fiction prototyping, experiential futures, and transition design.

Scenario generation

Scenario generation has its roots in storytelling. The “RAND Corporation borrowed the Hollywood term scenario, referring to a movie script, to describe their work with military planners developing contingency plans” (Hammoud & Nash, 2014, p. 2). Scenarios are a set of alternative futures that “describe a world to come, making a systematic set of assumptions about the drivers shaping that world. They may be brief and descriptive, or they may include story-like narratives that represent the point of view of personas in the future” (Institute for the Future, 2017). Foresight practitioners use several inductive and deductive methods to create scenarios including Generic Images of the Future, 2×2 Matrix, and Branch Analysis Method, amongst others (Bishop, Hines, & Collins, 2007).

Though scenarios are prototypes of the future designed for a variety of purposes, “their primary purpose is to guide exploration of possible future states” (Schultz & Curry, 2009, p. 36). Scenarios are akin to worldbuilding because they describe future states. However, a “critique of existing scenario output is that too much of it consists of ‘snapshot’ scenarios, which merely describe the future conditions without explaining how they evolved” (Schultz & Curry, 2009, p. 37; List, 2004). Compared to novels and films, they lack breadth and depth.

Science fiction prototyping

Science fiction prototyping (SFP) is the systematic process of pulling science into narratives in order to generate technological prototypes and understand their human impact (Johnson, 2011). This method strategically mimics science fiction while leveraging the iterative, prototyping approach of design-thinking. SFP also leverages the interplay between worldbuilding and storytelling through the use of narrative, which scenarios sometimes lack.

Technology in science fiction is an aspect of worldbuilding because an artifact can exist across multiple stories (e.g. lightsabers are used in all Star Wars films). Since SFP aims to generate and understand the use of an artifact, it may fail to depict the broader system and the nuances and implications of those systems. It reinforces the idea that science fiction is most useful for product design and tech innovation, and ignores its potential for systemic design and future state prototyping.

Experiential futures

Experiential futures are “situations and stuff from the future to catalyse insight and change” (Candy, 2015). Both it and SFP are closely related to speculative design. Speculative design places “new technological developments within imaginary but believable everyday situations that would allow us to debate the implications of different technological futures before they happen” (Dunne & Raby, n.d.). Speculative designs can be as simple as an unergonomic chair or “as substantial as a public transport infrastructure…At either end of the scale, the aim… is always to improve the future” (Kolehmainen, 2016).

Similar to SFP, the ‘stuff’ in experiential futures reflect worldbuilding, while the ‘situations’ are a blend of worldbuilding and storytelling, using story elements such as characterization and plot. Though it is more concrete than a scenario, experiential futures often depict instances within a broader world rather than a robust world. The method has one distinct advantage over science fiction: an experiential future brings a future into the real world, making it an immediate, firsthand encounter. Advancements in virtual and augmented reality may blur the lines between experiential futures and science fiction.

Transition design

An emerging area of design that leverages science fiction, foresight, and systems thinking is transition design. It argues that we must go beyond social innovation, which “challenges existing socio-economic and political paradigms” and often lacks a long-term, systemic view (Irwin, Kossoff, Tonkinwise, & Scupelli, 2015, p. 8). Instead, transition design calls for “radically new ideas and compelling visions of sustainable futures” that leverage “future-based narratives that come from the field of science fiction, narrative and storytelling, future-casting/futuring and speculative and critical design” (p. 3). Similar to Octavia’s Brood and Project Hieroglyph , transition design aims to use science fiction to imagine brighter worlds and the pathways there.

Recent research in transition design yielded a worldbuilding model inspired by the work of science fiction authors, called Seven Foundations (Zaidi, 2017). It draws upon elements of foresight, design, and systems-thinking to provide a framework for creating new visions of the future using a first-principles approach. Both the model and the field of transition design are relatively new additions to the foresight and design landscape and warrant further exploration.

Worldbuilding in Science Fiction

In science fiction, worldbuilding is expansive and elaborate, and the outcome is often a high fidelity product such as a novel or film. Unlike foresight and design, which are strategic practices subject to real-world constraints (e.g. client objectives) and resources (e.g. time and money), the worlds of science fiction are a creative endeavor. A world may be constructed iteratively over years, or collaboratively assembled with robust support structures (e.g. films supported by studios). The result is richer and bigger worlds.

Science fiction gives us a world and story at once, depicting the broader context and implications of that context through plot and characters. It is this interplay between worldbuilding and storytelling that makes science fiction compelling as a strategic tool. According to Lombardo, “a good story about a possible future, with its drama, sensory detail, and nuances, is psychologically more compelling and realistic than an abstract futurist scenario or statistical prediction. Further, science fiction also personally draws us into a rich vicarious experience of the future through vivid and memorable characterizations” (2018, p. 2).

Worldbuilding acts as a backdrop for emotionally resonant human experiences as well as the mundane, everyday life. When science fiction creators introduce us to new products, they depict the gestures and interactions required to use them, and moments when those products fail. When introduced to a new system, we see an alternative political reality, what it means to live within that reality, and possibly how to challenge that alternative status quo. The inner worlds and outer behaviours of characters provide filters for storyworlds. A scenario may introduce an artificially intelligent companion; science fiction depicts what it means to fall in love with it.

Though foresight scenarios may include ‘a day in the life’ vignettes, it is rare to see elaborate storytelling with a cast of characters. Neither do we see conversations between characters that explore the implications of the scenarios they occupy. Characters that reflect, interact with each other and the world, and engage in dialogue provide an accessible entry point into a world, along with multiple personas to navigate it. Situational experiential futures do capture some interplay between world and story. However, they are typically not documented and disseminated like science fiction is, limiting their real-world impact and opportunities for inspiration and deconstruction. Often, the conversation ends when the experience ends.

The worlds of science fiction also contain prototypes for complete and coherent systemic states, technologies, relationships, and values. The systemic nature of storyworlds allows us to repeatedly mine a world for new ideas and insights, with different stakeholders deriving different value. For instance, an entrepreneur may look to Blade Runner for product innovation, a transportation specialist for city planning, or a lawyer for human rights implications. Robust worlds provide endless strategic possibilities because they are difficult to exhaust.

Borrowing from Science Fiction

More recently, foresight practitioners and designers are leveraging worldbuilding in new ways. For instance, The Thing From the Future , created by Stuart Candy and Jeff Watson, is a game that prompts “thought-provoking descriptions of hypothetical objects from different near, medium, and long-term futures” (Situation Lab, n.d.). The game may “yield close to 40,000 unique permutations in the redux edition (and over 3.7 million in the more complex, multivariate earlier version)” (Candy, 2018, p. 238). Each permutation provides a scaffold for worldbuilding.

Alex McDowell, Director of the World Building Media Lab at the University of Southern California, uses worldbuilding and storytelling techniques both on and off screen. Recently, McDowell used worldbuilding techniques during a housing and sustainability development project on behalf of a Saudi Arabian foundation. The project looked “ten years into the future of a specific Bedouin tribe, a nomadic tribe who had been settled and fallen into abject poverty, with failing crops and decaying shelter” (McDowell, 2019, p. 109). This approach allowed members of the community to imagine alternatives “from sustainable housing to permaculture that establishes new and robust crops, [that]are all being implemented in the real world” (McDowell, 2019, p. 109).

Understanding the process of worldbuilding in science fiction can enrich design and foresight practice. Key concepts from science fiction authors that could influence design and foresight include designing for coherence, user testing worlds, and fostering a superstructure of culture.

Designing for coherence

When science fiction authors like Ursula K. Le Guin create worlds, they ensure those worlds are coherent. Coherence implies that the design of a world has internal logical consistency.

In an open letter titled “Plausibility in Fantasy”, Ursula K. Le Guin stated that:

While I am composing I have no abstract ideas, purposes, or policies in mind, but am intent only on following the story . . . Then there is detail. The more realistic, exact, ‘factual’ detail in a fantasy story, the more sensually things and acts are imagined and described, the more plausible the world will be. After all, it is a world made entirely of words. Exact and vivid words make an exact and vivid world (Le Guin, 2005).

Like Le Guin, when we design products, policies, strategies, etc., we too should aim to achieve coherence, ensuring that our designs and their details fit both with the current and emerging states of our world. For instance, are the products we create today coherent with the emerging realities of climate change? If not, what are the consequences?

User testing worlds

Author N.K. Jemisin also strives for coherent worlds, but takes a different approach:

Sometimes I’ll write a short story set in that universe to try and solidify my ideas. Not the same plot, not even the same characters; just playing around with the world. I call this a ‘proof of concept’ story, for lack of a better description — basically I’m testing the worldbuilding to see if it’s complete enough to support a novel yet. Often the act of writing the story helps me catch glaring holes in my worldbuilding (Jemisin, 2011).

Personas and user journeys are staples of design work. In order to build robust worlds that we can mine for strategic purposes, we should test our designs and scenarios with multiple, diverging narratives. This includes understanding how different people (or personas) may approach our designs or scenarios, with consideration for extreme and/or unexpected users. Doing so may provide additional insights on how our designs and proposed future states will impact and influence people while mitigating unintended consequences.

It may also benefit us to explore how personas and user journeys might interact and influence each other. This may require prototyping and iterating conversations between various stakeholders, with the goal of generating diverse alternatives that allow for exploration, rather than a single refined outcome. For instance, what conversations may occur between entrepreneurs and government officials in the context of artificial intelligence in 2040? What happens when we filter those conversations through different emotions?

Fostering a superstructure of culture

Authors William Gibson and Samuel Delaney have suggested that readers develop a “superstructure of culture on top of [an existing cultural construct]that allows them to enjoy” science fiction (Newitz, 2014). In other words, by engaging with alternative future worlds, science fiction readers develop an understanding of the modular, foundational components of a culture. They build their capacity to engage with alternative systems and ways of living.

Before we can design better futures for all, we have to build a societal-wide capacity to envision and design alternatives. This requires cultivating a multiple futures perspective while accounting for the multiple perspectives that already exist in the present. Science fiction and futures-based narratives may help people develop a superstructure, and serve as a strategic precursor to widespread change. Creating more foresight-based narratives for various ages, and embedding information about complex problems within them, may prove beneficial.

Furthermore, it may be worthwhile to explore the role of narrative designers (individuals who design elements of story in games), and what such a role could play in society. If the Kremlin can employ a political technologist who uses science fiction to create chaos, how might we create roles and capacities that allow society to envision and realize collective preferred futures through storytelling? Could such a role help society foster a superstructure of culture and design for collective good? The concept of a cultural superstructure and the role of a narrative designer may have significant implications for both design and foresight, and warrant further exploration.

The concept of worldbuilding in science fiction marries elements of foresight and design, and offers opportunities to enrich both practices. By understanding the many ways in which science fiction is used throughout society and borrowing from its worldbuilding processes, we may harness new insights on how to design emotionally resonant futures that inspire real-world action. Designing for coherence with emerging future states, user testing multiple, alternative worlds, and fostering a superstructure of culture may help strengthen the existing overlaps between foresight and design.

As researchers and practitioners, we should further explore of the worldbuilding processes of science fiction in order to design new, emotionally resonant visions of the future, and explore our place within those visions. Though the future looks precarious, a better world may be on the horizon if we work towards it.

Correspondence

Independent Scholar

E-mail: [email protected]

1. Speculative fiction “includes fantasy, science fiction, and horror, but also their derivatives, hybrids, and cognate genres like the gothic, dystopia, weird fiction, post-apocalyptic fiction, ghost stories, superhero tales, alternate history, steampunk, slipstream, magic realism, fractured fairy tales, and more (Oziewicz, 2017).

2. Based on an analysis of multiple definitions, “systems thinking is a set of synergistic analytic skills used to improve the capability of identifying and understanding systems, predicting their behaviors, and devising modifications to them in order to produce desired effects (Arnold & Wade, 2015).

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Showing result 1 - 5 of 42 swedish dissertations containing the words science fiction .

1. Conflicting Times : Multiple Temporalities in Contemporary Chinese Science Fiction

Author : Erik Mo Welin ; Joakim Enwall ; Hua Li ; Uppsala universitet ; [] Keywords : HUMANIORA ; HUMANITIES ; Science fiction ; Chinese literature ; Temporality ; Time travel ; Alternate history ; Apocalypse ; Chronopolitics ; Sinologi ; Sinology ;

Abstract : This dissertation explores the intersection of temporality and politics in contemporary Chinese science fiction. Building on previous research on Chinese science fiction, science fiction studies, as well as narrative theory and historical theory, the investigation focuses on eight key texts written by the writers Han Song, Liu Cixin, and Baoshu. READ MORE

2. Alien Places in Late Soviet Science Fiction : The "Unexpected Encounters" of Arkady and Boris Strugatsky as Novels and Films

Author : Henriette Cederlöf ; Anna Ljunggren ; Yvonne Howell ; Stockholms universitet ; [] Keywords : HUMANIORA ; HUMANITIES ; Arkady Strugatsky ; Boris Strugatsky ; science fiction ; heterotopia ; paradigm shift ; Soviet culture ; 1970s ; Gothic ; adaptation ; Stalker ; Roadside Picnic ; Dead Mountaineer s Hotel ; Arkadij Strugatskij ; Boris Strugatskij ; paradigmskifte ; science fiction ; heterotopi ; Sovjetunionen ; 1970-talet ; adaption ; slaviska språk ; Slavic Languages ;

Abstract : This dissertation deals with how science fiction reflects the shift in cultural paradigms that occurred in the Soviet Union between the 1960s and the 1970s. Interest was displaced from the rational to the irrational, from a scientific-technologically oriented optimism about the future to art, religion, philosophy and metaphysics. READ MORE

3. The Woke Franchise : Representing and Co-opting Resistance in Young Adult, Superhero, and Speculative Fiction

Author : Amélie Hurkens ; David Watson ; Ashleigh Harris ; Paul Crosthwaite ; Uppsala universitet ; [] Keywords : HUMANIORA ; HUMANITIES ; HUMANIORA ; HUMANITIES ; identity politics ; the publishing industry ; popular literary culture ; woke capitalism ; neoliberalism ; racial capitalism ; the franchise ; blockbusters ; awards ; YA fiction ; superhero fiction ; comic books ; speculative fiction ; science fiction and fantasy ; English ; Engelska ;

Abstract : In the last decade, U.S. popular literary culture has been under increasing pressure to include more racially and other marginalized groups. READ MORE

4. Estranging Cognition : Feminist Science Fiction and the Borders of Reason

Author : Jenny Bonnevier ; Rolf Lundén ; Jane Donawerth ; Brian Attebery ; Uppsala universitet ; [] Keywords : HUMANIORA ; HUMANITIES ; English language ; science fiction ; feminist theory ; epistemology ; Ursula Le Guin ; Suzy McKee Charnas ; Joanna Russ ; Engelska ; English language ; Engelska språket ; English ; Engelska ;

Abstract : This study explores the intersections of three different fields: feminism, science fiction, and epistemology. It argues that as a genre, science fiction is dependent on epistemological discourses that have their roots in the stories and self-images of modern science. READ MORE

5. Unleashing Science Popularisation: Studies on Science as Popular Culture

Author : Andreas Gunnarsson ; Göteborgs universitet ; [] Keywords : SAMHÄLLSVETENSKAP ; SOCIAL SCIENCES ; science popularisation ; popular culture ; public understanding of science ; science and the media ;

Abstract : This thesis aims to broaden the concept of science popularisation. It argues that the conventional view of popularisation as the public communication of appropriately simplified versions of established facts to lay audiences fails to capture the multifaceted nature of popularisation practices through which science and popular culture are recombined. READ MORE

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Universe Today

Space and astronomy news

New Study Examines the Links Between Science Fiction and Astronomy

“Today’s science fiction is tomorrow’s science fact.” This quote, attributed to Isaac Asimov, captures science’s intricate relationship with science fiction. And it is hardly a one-way relationship. Whereas science fiction is constantly evolving to reflect new scientific discoveries and theories, science itself has a long history of drawing inspiration from the works of visionary authors, filmmakers, and popular culture. And in some cases, where scientists themselves were the visionaries (like Asimov himself), you had an instance of both!

The relationship between the two was the subject of a recent study by Samuel Boissier , a researcher with the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS) and the director of research at the Laboratoire d’astrophysique de Marseille (LAM). In an age when misinformation, “deepfakes,” and deliberate attempts to obscure scientific truths are at an all-time high, examining the interconnection between science, art, and science fiction is very important. According to Boissier, doing so offers people in the scientific community a way to engage with the public in a way that is relatable and accessible.

The relationship between science fiction and scientific fact is well-documented and has been the subject of academic research. Recent examples (that we have written about) include how exoplanets are depicted , the lives of many professional scientists , and popular depictions of space travel . However, when a concept fails to meet the burden of proof – such as FTL travel using wormholes or the EMDrive – the typical reaction is to label it as “science fiction.” Nevertheless, science fiction authors are often professional scientists themselves or represent science accurately in their stories – hence the term “hard SF.”

Inspiring SF (and Vice Versa)

In his paper, Boissier (himself a professional astronomer and astrophysicist) addresses how hard science fiction can be used for educational purposes, particularly in astronomy and astrophysics! What’s more, examples can be found in many forms of popular media, including literature, film, and video games. As he told Universe Today via email:

“Science Fiction is using astronomy to offer to the public blockbusters at the movies (e.g. Interstellar), series or movies in streaming media ( Don’t Look Up, The Expanse ), many books from classic authors (Isaac Asimov, Arthur C. Clarke) or more moderns ones (Kim Stanley Robinson), comics (the adventures of Valerian and Laureline), or video games ( Mass Effect, No Man’s Sky ) that have a very large cumulated audience. Astronomers can use Science Fiction to illustrate physics or astronomical facts. It might be a good way to talk about our work and our methods by comparing them to examples with which a large audience is familiar.”

Not only do the following examples contain “hard” science, but they also explore concepts that individuals may not otherwise be familiar with. For instance, the Mass Effect series contains one of the more well-known proposed resolutions to Fermi’s Paradox, the Berserker Hypothesis (or “Killer Probe Scenario”). The Expanse series (the novels and the miniseries adaptation) is renowned for featuring scientific elements that make the story compelling and realistic. Examples include realistic depictions of life on Mars, larger asteroids, and spacecraft, including the effects of low gravity (and microgravity).

In terms of literature, Asimov and Clarke are well-known examples of scientists who used the genre to explore speculative ideas grounded in science. Asimov’s I, Robot series explored how the development of artificial intelligence (AI) would affect our society. Interestingly enough, Asimov wrote the series to address what he felt was the tired and cliched trope of robot uprisings (“kill all humans” and such!). Strangely, the novel was adapted into the 2004 film starring Will Smith, which centered on the premise of a robot uprising (what bitter irony!)

Clarke’s work earned him the nickname “the prophet of the future,” a well-deserved moniker! In Islands in the Sky (1952), he presented the concept of a Space Elevator (named Port Goddard and located in New Guinea) that allows for regular trips to space. Rendezvous with Rama presents readers with the concept of an O’Neill Cylinder traveling between star systems and presents a detailed concept of extraterrestrials. But his most well-known work is arguably 2001: A Space Odyssey, the novel released concurrently with the film in 1968.

The film itself was based on two of Clarke’s short stories, Encounter in the Dawn (1953) and The Sentinel (1948), which were adapted to create the first two parts of the film (The Dawn of Man and Mission to the Moon). These short stories explore the ideas of first contact between ancient humans and extraterrestrials (paleocontact) and the discovery of an alien artifact on the Moon. This became the basis for The Monolith in the film, which is responsible for influencing the evolution of early hominids. These ideas inspired more recent films like Prometheus , Arrivals , and others that explore paleocontact and first contact.

As Boissier explained, these novels and films inspired many to get into astronomy, astrophysics, and STEM. “In a recent study , it was shown that 93 percent of British professional astronomers have an interest in Science Fiction, and 69 percent consider that Science Fiction influenced their career or life choice. I am presenting a similar study made for French astronomers, performed during and just after the 2024 meeting of the French Society of Astronomy and Astrophysics (Journees 2024 de la SF2A).”

But, of course, the relationship between SF and popular media is hardly one-way. After the 2024 SF2A meeting, Boissier met with his colleague, astronomer Frank Selsis , who shared a few examples of how science fiction inspired scientific research. “Selsis told me after the meeting that author Laurence Suhner wrote a short story about an [exoplanet around] TRAPPIST-1 at the same time of its discovery, the observations being announced in the journal Nature at the time.”

Selsis, the research director of the Exoplanets, CLImates, and Planetary Systems Evolution (ECLIPSE) lab at the University of Bordeaux, was part of the consortium that revealed the presence of a potentially habitable exoplanet around Proxima Centauri (Proxima b) in August 2016. As he related to Boissier, he was also a co-author of a study inspired by a conversation with Luvan , a French SF author known for her novel Agrapha . During a presentation last year at the Teich Bird Sanctuary , Selsis spoke on the subject of the relationship between science fiction and exoplanet research (see video above).

Advising SF Writers

As noted, Boissier addresses how science fiction materials can be used as a pedagogical resource. Contrary to what many believe, there are many popular science fiction franchises where professional scientists advised the writers and visual effects departments. “Maybe one of the most famous examples is the imagery of the black hole and its accretion disk [in Interstellar ], for which actual computations were performed,” said Boissier. “Kip Thorne was the advisor for the movie. You will find many discussions about it, including a book by Thorne himself.”

Kip Thorne’s computational models (and Interstellar ‘s visuals) were confirmed in 2019 when the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) collaboration released the first image of a supermassive black hole and its accretion disk. In 2021, the EHT released the first image of the SMBHs at the center of the Centaurus A galaxy and the radio jet emanating from it. In 2022, they revealed the first image of Sagittarius A* , the SMBH at the heart of the Milky Way galaxy! Another example that Boissier enjoys citing is the TV series Futurama , where astronomer David Schiminovich of Columbia University helped advise one of the show’s creators.

According to Boissier, this included the 2009 video Into the Wild Green Yonder , which featured a “ violet dwarf star .” This was a clear reference to the work Schiminovich did with NASA’s Galaxy Evolution Explorer (GALEX) mission, which observed the Universe between 2003 and 2013 in the ultraviolet wavelength. Also, fans of the series will recall episodes that featured noted scientists like Stephen Hawking, Bill Nye, and noted environmentalist Al Gore. It has also explored concepts ranging from Schrodinger’s Cat, General Relativity, Lorentz Invariance, the “ Grey Goo ” scenario, and Simulation Theory.

Educating with SF

In addition to recognizing how SF has inspired real-life scientists (and vice versa), Boissier also explores how SF can be used as a pedagogical resource. One of the greatest virtues, says Boissier, is the way SF can make real science accessible to people who might otherwise be intimidated to learn about it:

“I think some people are not confident enough to think they can follow an astronomy lecture or conference, [whereas] they have no problem going to the theatre to watch a Science Fiction movie. If an astronomer is there to say a few words about science after the movie, we can meet with an audience that we would not find in other places. So, to me, it is important to reach more people.” “I have seen a presentation by Roland Lehoucq in France that was giving shining examples indeed. For instance, using the Star Wars scene in which lightning flashes from the Emperor’s fingers, he showed it is possible to compute the potential difference needed for this effect and how thick the soles of his shoes need to be to avoid electrocution. And he computed how much energy is needed for lightsabers to cut through a metal door (it’s a lot!). Many books explore these types of things, usually starting with “The Science of TITLE HERE”!

Examples include Kip Thorne’s The Science of Interstellar , Kevin R. Grazier’s The Science of Dune , and Lawrence M. Krauss and Stephen Hawking’s The Physics of Star Trek . Moreover, using SF to educate people about science is also a way of combatting misinformation, which is especially important in the “age of the internet,” where fringe theories have become more mainstream. One need look no further than social media platforms to find examples, such as “Flat Earth” theory, Creationism, and conspiracy theories involving vaccinations, election outcomes, and assorted ideas that exploit ignorance and fear.

To Boissier, this makes educating people about science, astronomy, and the STEMs (and in a way that is accessible) more important than ever. “To me, it is important because too many people are disconnected from science,” he said. “There is a lot of fake news and misinformation, including subjects on which science can help citizens understand the world. Those are opportunities to bring a little bit of science, to talk about the scientific methods that everybody should know about!”

For more information on how SF has inspired science and scientists, check out this list from the Astronomy and Astrophysics Group at the University of Warwick .

Further Reading: arXiv

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One Reply to “New Study Examines the Links Between Science Fiction and Astronomy”

Very enjoyable article. Thank you! However Bill Nye is NOT a noted scientist (he is a science popularizer), and equating him with Stephen Hawking does the memory of Dr Hawking a grave disservice.

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August 12, 2024

This article has been reviewed according to Science X's editorial process and policies . Editors have highlighted the following attributes while ensuring the content's credibility:

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New study examines the links between science fiction and astronomy

by Matt Williams, Universe Today

"Today's science fiction is tomorrow's science fact." This quote, attributed to Isaac Asimov, captures science's intricate relationship with science fiction. And it is hardly a one-way relationship.

Whereas science fiction is constantly evolving to reflect new scientific discoveries and theories, science itself has a long history of drawing inspiration from the works of visionary authors, filmmakers, and popular culture. And in some cases, where scientists themselves were the visionaries (like Asimov himself), you had an instance of both.

The relationship between the two was the subject of a recent study by Samuel Boissier, a researcher with the Center National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS) and the director of research at the Laboratoire d'astrophysique de Marseille (LAM). The study is published on the arXiv preprint server.

In an age when misinformation, "deepfakes," and deliberate attempts to obscure scientific truths are at an all-time high, examining the interconnection between science, art, and science fiction is very important. According to Boissier, doing so offers people in the scientific community a way to engage with the public in a way that is relatable and accessible.

The relationship between science fiction and scientific fact is well-documented and has been the subject of academic research. Recent examples (that we have written about) include how exoplanets are depicted, the lives of many professional scientists, and popular depictions of space travel.

However, when a concept fails to meet the burden of proof—such as FTL travel using wormholes or the EMDrive—the typical reaction is to label it as "science fiction." Nevertheless, science fiction authors are often professional scientists themselves or represent science accurately in their stories—hence the term "hard SF."

Inspiring SF (and vice versa)

In his paper, Boissier (himself a professional astronomer and astrophysicist) addresses how hard science fiction can be used for educational purposes, particularly in astronomy and astrophysics. What's more, examples can be found in many forms of popular media, including literature, film, and video games. As he told Universe Today via email:

"Science fiction is using astronomy to offer to the public blockbusters at the movies (e.g., Interstellar), series or movies in streaming media ('Don't Look Up,' 'The Expanse'), many books from classic authors (Isaac Asimov, Arthur C. Clarke) or more modern ones (Kim Stanley Robinson), comics (the adventures of Valerian and Laureline), or video games (Mass Effect, No Man's Sky) that have a very large cumulated audience.

"Astronomers can use science fiction to illustrate physics or astronomical facts. It might be a good way to talk about our work and our methods by comparing them to examples with which a large audience is familiar."

Not only do the following examples contain "hard" science, but they also explore concepts that individuals may not otherwise be familiar with. For instance, the Mass Effect series contains one of the more well-known proposed resolutions to Fermi's paradox, the berserker hypothesis (or "killer probe scenario").

The Expanse series (the novels and the miniseries adaptation) is renowned for featuring scientific elements that make the story compelling and realistic. Examples include realistic depictions of life on Mars, larger asteroids, and spacecraft, including the effects of low gravity (and microgravity).

In terms of literature, Asimov and Clarke are well-known examples of scientists who used the genre to explore speculative ideas grounded in science. Asimov's "I, Robot" series explored how the development of artificial intelligence (AI) would affect our society.

Interestingly enough, Asimov wrote the series to address what he felt was the tired and cliched trope of robot uprisings ("kill all humans" and such). Strangely, the novel was adapted into the 2004 film starring Will Smith, which centered on the premise of a robot uprising (what bitter irony.)

Clarke's work earned him the nickname "the prophet of the future," a well-deserved moniker. In Islands in the Sky (1952), he presented the concept of a space elevator (named Port Goddard and located in New Guinea) that allows for regular trips to space.

"Rendezvous with Rama" presents readers with the concept of an O'Neill Cylinder traveling between star systems and presents a detailed concept of extraterrestrials. But his most well-known work is "2001: A Space Odyssey," the novel released concurrently with the film in 1968.

The film itself was based on two of Clarke's short stories, "Encounter in the Dawn" (1953) and "The Sentinel" (1948), which were adapted to create the first two parts of the film ("The Dawn of Man" and "Mission to the Moon"). These short stories explore the ideas of first contact between ancient humans and extraterrestrials (paleocontact) and the discovery of an alien artifact on the moon.

This became the basis for the monolith in the film, which is responsible for influencing the evolution of early hominids. These ideas inspired more recent films like "Prometheus," "Arrivals," and others that explore paleocontact and first contact.

As Boissier explained, these novels and films inspired many to get into astronomy, astrophysics, and STEM. "In a recent study , it was shown that 93% of British professional astronomers have an interest in science fiction, and 69% consider that science fiction influenced their career or life choice.

"I presented a similar study made for French astronomers, performed during and just after the 2024 meeting of the French Society of Astronomy and Astrophysics ( Journees 2024 de la SF2A )."

But, of course, the relationship between SF and popular media is hardly one-way. After the 2024 SF2A meeting, Boissier met with his colleague, astronomer Frank Selsis, who shared a few examples of how science fiction inspired scientific research.

"Selsis told me after the meeting that author Laurence Suhner wrote a short story about an [exoplanet around] TRAPPIST-1 at the same time of its discovery, the observations being announced in the journal Nature at the time."

Selsis, the research director of the Exoplanets, CLImates, and Planetary Systems Evolution (ECLIPSE) lab at the University of Bordeaux, was part of the consortium that revealed the presence of a potentially habitable exoplanet around Proxima Centauri (Proxima b) in August 2016.

As he related to Boissier, he was also a co-author of a study inspired by a conversation with Luvan, a French SF author known for her novel Agrapha. During a presentation last year at the Teich Bird Sanctuary, Selsis spoke on the subject of the relationship between science fiction and exoplanet research (see video above).

Advising SF Writers

As noted, Boissier addresses how science fiction materials can be used as a pedagogical resource. Contrary to what many believe, there are many popular science fiction franchises where professional scientists advised the writers and visual effects departments.

"Maybe one of the most famous examples is the imagery of the black hole and its accretion disk [in Interstellar], for which actual computations were performed," said Boissier. "Kip Thorne was the advisor for the movie. You will find many discussions about it, including a book by Thorne himself."

Kip Thorne's computational models (and Interstellar's visuals) were confirmed in 2019 when the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) collaboration released the first image of a supermassive black hole and its accretion disk.

In 2021, the EHT released the first image of the SMBHs at the center of the Centaurus A galaxy and the radio jet emanating from it. In 2022, they revealed the first image of Sagittarius A*, the SMBH at the heart of the Milky Way galaxy.

Another example that Boissier enjoys citing is the TV series "Futurama," where astronomer David Schiminovich of Columbia University helped advise one of the show's creators.

According to Boissier, this included the 2009 video Into the Wild Green Yonder, which featured a "violet dwarf star." This was a clear reference to the work Schiminovich did with NASA's Galaxy Evolution Explorer (GALEX) mission, which observed the universe between 2003 and 2013 in the ultraviolet wavelength.

Also, fans of the series will recall episodes that featured noted scientists like Stephen Hawking, Bill Nye, and noted environmentalist Al Gore. It has also explored concepts ranging from Schrodinger'S cat, general relativity, Lorentz invariance, the "gray goo" scenario, and simulation theory.

Educating with SF

In addition to recognizing how SF has inspired real-life scientists (and vice versa), Boissier also explores how SF can be used as a pedagogical resource. One of the greatest virtues, says Boissier, is the way SF can make real science accessible to people who might otherwise be intimidated to learn about it:

"I think some people are not confident enough to think they can follow an astronomy lecture or conference, [whereas] they have no problem going to the theatre to watch a science fiction movie. If an astronomer is there to say a few words about science after the movie, we can meet with an audience that we would not find in other places. So, to me, it is important to reach more people."

"I have seen a presentation by Roland Lehoucq in France that was giving shining examples indeed. For instance, using the Star Wars scene in which lightning flashes from the Emperor's fingers, he showed it is possible to compute the potential difference needed for this effect and how thick the soles of his shoes need to be to avoid electrocution. And he computed how much energy is needed for lightsabers to cut through a metal door (it's a lot). Many books explore these types of things, usually starting with "The Science of TITLE HERE."

Examples include Kip Thorne's "The Science of Interstellar," Kevin R. Grazier's "The Science of Dune," and Lawrence M. Krauss and Stephen Hawking's "The Physics of Star Trek."

Moreover, using SF to educate people about science is also a way of combating misinformation, which is especially important in the "age of the internet," where fringe theories have become more mainstream. One need look no further than social media platforms to find examples, such as "flat earth" theory, creationism, and conspiracy theories involving vaccinations, election outcomes, and assorted ideas that exploit ignorance and fear.

To Boissier, this makes educating people about science, astronomy, and the STEMs (and in a way that is accessible) more important than ever. "To me, it is important because too many people are disconnected from science," he said.

"There is a lot of fake news and misinformation, including subjects on which science can help citizens understand the world. Those are opportunities to bring a little bit of science, to talk about the scientific methods that everybody should know about."

For more information on how SF has inspired science and scientists, check out this list from the Astronomy and Astrophysics Group at the University of Warwick .

Journal information: Nature , arXiv

Provided by Universe Today

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How Black female science fiction and fantasy writers are upending the narrative

There may be only a few making waves. But their effect has been seismic.

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Science fiction has always been a way to envision the future. Sometimes for the optimal; sometimes as the future might be if humans do not zig toward the good and just. As the legendary science fiction author Isaac Asimov once wrote, "the saddest aspect of life right now is that science fiction gathers knowledge faster than society gathers wisdom."

Black women have always gathered knowledge faster than society writ large gathers wisdom. Thus, a Black woman science fiction — or fantasy — writer might be the most prescient writers of these genres. The field has long been run by mostly white men: the J.R.R. Tolkiens, Philip K. Dicks and George R. R. Martins of the field. But the popularity and foresight of a handful of Black female writers proves that the reading public is ready to imagine a better tomorrow, today. 

Tomi Adeyemi: the fresh storyteller

The final installment of Adeyemi's "Legacy of Orisha" trilogy, "Children of Anguish and Anarchy," was released on June 25, 2024 and leapt to the top of the New York Times Children's and Young Adult bestsellers list. The previous two titles in the series did the same when released. "There is something about reading when you're young that is so different from reading when you're an adult," Adeyemi said when interviewed in SBJCT . "Books have the opportunity to bury themselves in your heart and shape the way you think about the world." 

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Adeyemi, a Nigerian American writer, merges West African mythology with a textual undercurrent about the effects of the very real transatlantic slave trade. The series follows Zélie Adebola, a girl who comes from a line of magicians. In the final book, a group of colonizers called Skulls enslave Zelie and her compatriots. These are young adult books only in their marketing strategy. "It goes even deeper than entertainment, because I wanted to help people see Black people, recognize them and empathize with them and identify their pain and feel the need to put a stop to it and fight against it," Adeyemi said to Assembly , a website from Malala Yousafzai's Malala Fund.

Perhaps predictably, Adeyemi has experienced a Hollywood roller coaster since the first book's debut. Studios have picked up the rights to turn the first title into a movie, only to let the rights run out. Then, in 2022, Paramount snagged the rights to "Children of Blood and Bone," the first in the series, and agreed to sign Adeyemi on as screenwriter, with renowned director Gina Prince-Bythewood at the helm. 

Octavia Butler: the revered clairvoyant 

Octavia Butler, who died in 2006, once said of "The Parable of the Sower," her celebrated 1993 novel about a woman who feels others' pain, "I began writing the book with the thought that maybe what we needed was the biological conscience. It does seem to me that there are too many people in this world who would just as soon wipe out half their country if they could rule the other half." Long has it been argued that the United States is a country low on empathy. Butler named that American disease in this novel and across her oeuvre. 

As the years have ticked on, Butler's speculative visions of the future have come to uncanny fruition. "The smoke-choked air from fire gone wild, the cresting rivers and rising seas, the sweltering heat and receding lakes, the melting away of civil society and political stability, the light-year leaps in artificial intelligence — Octavia Butler foresaw them all," wrote Tiya Miles, a professor and historian at Harvard University, in The Atlantic .

"Kindred," Butler's 1979 first-person novel about a Black woman who keeps being pulled from the 20th century to the antebellum era, was made into a series on FX in 2022. And there have been near-adaptations of "The Parable of the Sower" for years. With or without Hollywood, Butler's clairvoyance remains unbending. As the writer Tananarive Due said about Butler and her work, "sister, we got cities burning … they were telling her. And how dare she, you know, sort of retreat into this world. But actually, she was showing us an even bigger world, you know, something that we couldn't even wrap our minds around." 

N.K. Jemisin: the blockbuster world shaper

Awards are far from the end-all of an author's value. Still, when a Black woman wins three consecutive Hugo Awards for best novel, the first time any author has ever done so, it is telling. 

Jemisin's acclaimed Broken Earth trilogy had science fiction and fantasy critics agog. But readers of all stripes were drawn to the series' intermingling of climate catastrophe , magic, stalwart women and unabashed sexuality. 

In Jemisin's work there is a cracking open. When she contemplates alternate worlds, she builds them brick by brick. In her world-building, she envisions universes in which equality and justice are goals that are sometimes achievable. And to do so requires an empathetic embrace of both the individual and the collective. 

"A good portion of the reason that we are dealing with this political bullshit, pardon my language, in the United States right now is because we've got a bunch of white people who are freaked out because demographics seem to be overwhelming them and because there was a Black president and they're suffering from the existential terror of extinction — even though there absolutely is no real logic to that terror," said Jemisin to The Paris Review . "That is what we've been struggling with, people who are so fragile that they're literally willing to destroy the planet rather than give up controlling it. They're literally not willing to do things that are good for everyone because they're terrified of one person who they don't like maybe getting some benefit from that."

Her message is resonating: Sony is set to produce all three of the Broken Earth's novels as movies. "The world is pretty unjust right now," said Jemisin to the outlet. "Those of us that have grown up on the short end of the justice stick understand this innately and want acknowledgement of that reality, because so much of American society is dedicated to weaving the illusion that what you see is not actually what is happening.… But fixing that is part of the job that science fiction and fantasy can do."

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Scott Hocker is an award-winning freelance writer and editor at The Week Digital. He has written food, travel, culture and lifestyle stories for local, national and international publications for more than 20 years. Scott also has more than 15 years of experience creating, implementing and managing content initiatives while working across departments to grow companies. His most recent editorial post was as editor-in-chief of Liquor.com. Previously, he was the editor-in-chief of Tasting Table and a senior editor at San Francisco magazine.  

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