Science Fiction Studies

Speculative Fictions and Cultures of Science Book Award 2022 Winner

The Speculative Fictions and Cultures of Science Book Award (previously the Science Fiction and Technoculture Studies Book Prize) honors an outstanding scholarly monograph that explores the intersections between popular culture, particularly science fiction, and the discourses and cultures of technoscience. The award is designed to recognize groundbreaking and exceptional contributions to the field. Books published in English between 1 January and 31 December 2022 were eligible for the award. The jury for the prize were Elizabeth Swanstrom (University of Utah), Gerry Canavan (Marquette University), and Paweł Frelik (University of Warsaw), who served as jury chair. After intense deliberations, the jury announce that the twelfth annual SFCS book award has been won by Nicole Starosielski, Associate Professor of Media, Culture, and Communication at New York University, for her Media Hot and Cold (Duke UP 2022). The monograph is nothing short of a new paradigm for thinking about science, technology, and cultural texts. Starosielski twists McLuhan's hot and cold media into a groundbreaking consideration of the role of heating and cooling in the postwar US, tracing the dream of mastering temperature across myriad sites of coloniality, empire, and struggles for social justice. Although the book is not centrally focused on speculative texts, its theoretical framework explores a fresh mix of already existing and speculative technologies, from artificially intelligent thermostats to energy generation and climate emergency to experimental heat-rays and the cold rooms necessary for advanced computation. In the process, it creates conditions for novel readings of both old and new works across a range of media, from classic figures in the genre such as Wells and Lovecraft to newer entries, including Mr. Robot and "coldsploitation" film. Media Hot and Cold reveals thermopower as nothing less than the key theoretical concept of the Anthropocene, and it promises to be a vibrant and productive framework for discussing speculative texts across a range of media, including those that are not obviously conceptualized as such. For this reason, Nicole Starosielski's Media Hot and Cold was the committee's unanimous choice for the 2022 SFTS Book Prize. The committee is also pleased to recognize Kazue Harada's excellent Sexuality, Maternity, and (Re)productive Futures: Women's Speculative Fiction in Contemporary Japan (Brill) as its 2022 honorable mention for its inventive interdisciplinary exploration of popular-culture texts at the intersections of science and technology studies, gender and sexuality studies, childhood studies, and aging studies.—SFS

Special Issue of Hélice: Motherhood in SF (FALL-WINTER 2024)

Many works of feminist speculative fiction specifically address topics such as reproduction (natural and assisted), reproductive control, and gender roles from different perspectives, sometimes holding opposing views. Gestational capacity is often considered one of the key indicators of sexual difference, becoming a recurring theme in feminist studies. Yet the topic of gestation and parenting is seldom addressed in science fiction. As Joanna Russ wrote in 2007, in many [End Page 135] feminist science-fiction texts that address gender, "the processes of parenting are never described." Rather, "The women who appear in these stories are [often] young and childless or middle-aged, with their children already grown and secure" (25).

The reason for this may have been a desire to escape misogynistic attacks on fiction that addresses these issues (cf. Algis Budrys's dismissive phrase "diaper stories," describing sf tales such as Judith Merrill's "That Only a Mother" (1948), or the strong influence of the feminisms of the 1970s and 1980s as raised by critics such as Shulamith Firestone (1970) and Jennifer Allen (1984), who concluded that pregnant women and mothers were, in a way, biologically trapped. As Adrienne Rich pointed out during that era, however, in contrast to the more traditional "motherhood," which can be experienced as a patriarchal institution, "motherhood," defined and centered on women, can be understood as an experience of female empowerment, which would later open the door to "matricentric feminism" (Andrea O'Reilly 2016).

In summary, while motherhood as an institution is frequently a place of oppression defined by men, women's own maternal experiences can become a source of power (O'Reilly 2021); hence, the importance of analyzing in depth...