Monkey See, Monkey Do: Planet of the Apes, Animalization and the Visual Politics of Occupation
By Emma Louise Backe When War for the Planet of the Apes (2017) concluded, Caesar had successfully led his people to a place where they might be able…
Tag: Science-fiction
Power Over the Story is Power Over All: Dune and the Messiah Machine
Power over Spice is power over all This is the opening line of Dune: Part Two, spoken in the throat-singing ceremonial language of the fearsome Sardaukar warriors. It is…
Science Fiction’s Emergent Anthropologies. SF Beyond Anthropological Science Fiction
My contribution to a really interesting issue on science fiction and the future in Rivista di antropologia contemporanea (2023). Abtsract: Science fiction and anthropology are separate projects,…
Book Review: Beyond colonial futures – Ethnofuturism and World Beyond: An Anthology of Papua New Guinean Speculative Fiction
By Christopher Marcatili McGavin, Kirsten (ed.). 2022. World Beyond: An anthology of Papua New Guinean Speculative Fiction. Sydney, Aus: Hibiscus Three. In the remote mountains of Papua New…
Ad-hoc Block: Dystopian Worlds and the War for Advertising
As artificial intelligence and algorithmic surveillance become more ubiquitous, we should really start to think about our relationship, not just to internet tracking and data collection, but to…
All These Worlds Are Yours Except Europa: Building Colonies without Colonization
First edition cover of 2010: Odyssey Two where the quote “all these worlds are yours except Europa…” is from. Beneath Europa’s frozen surface is an ocean thought to…
Pain-Free Mouse, being ‘human,’ and more-than-human ethics
The Voigt-Kampff test as seen in Blade Runner (1982). All copyrights to film held by Warner Bros. In the opening scene of Blade Runner, a fictional diagnostic called…
Translating Truth: Heaven’s Vault and Its Message to Gamers
By Catherine Hill If you’re a gamer, chances are you’ve played, seen, or at least heard of Heaven’s Vault, the newest game from Inkle Studios. In this adventure, players…
Navigating the Maze: Models of Cultural Revitalization in HBO’s Westworld
By Haley Bryant The Maze on Kissy’s scalp HBO’s 2016 reboot of the 1970’s sci-fi film Westworld is not only one of the most visually interesting television programs…
Call for Anthropological Speculative Fiction
“We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and…
Moon Monogamy 4: Participant Observation, Session 2
[This is the fourth installment of Moon Monogamy (And Other Things That Are Bound to Go Wrong) by Savannah Mandel. Previous installments: One , Two , Three] Beau shakes…
Fact in Fiction: Examining archaeology’s influence on the speculative genre
By Catherine Hill Anyone who has a passable knowledge of the works of novelist HP Lovecraft is probably aware of the prominent role that archaeology and intrepid archaeologists…
Moon Monogamy 3: Participant Observation, Session 1
[This is the third installment of Moon Monogamy (And Other Things That Are Bound to Go Wrong) by Savannah Mandel. The previous installments are here and here.] As you…
Google’s Empire: The Science Fiction of Power
“For as long as I can remember, I always wanted to make a film about libraries,” explains Ben Lewis, the director of Google and the World Brain (2013).…
Moon Monogamy 2: Preliminary Research, Session 1
[This is the second installment of Moon Monogamy (And Other Things That Are Bound to Go Wrong) by Savannah Mandel. The first installment is here.] You would think that…
A Desperate Empire Crashes in Venezuela
The April 30, 2019, coup attempt in Venezuela has come and gone. The coup has failed. “Failed state” theory just got a lot more complicated. No longer can…
Moon Monogamy 1 – Qualifications: One, Two, Three, Twelve, Thirteen, and Twenty-Seven
We need more worlds. Better worlds. We can’t overlook the need for horrifying, ruined worlds, true, but more than anything we need better worlds. The worlds academics build…
Alien Encounters
by Matthias Teeuwen I had read “Story of Your Life” by Ted Chiang (1998) and I wanted to write a blog about it. It contains a lot of…
Monstrous possibilities: Kaiju as beauty and terror
By Esther R. Anderson Kaiju are giant monsters that can be seen causing filmic chaos without apparent cause or motive. As genetically-engineered creatures, aliens, or remnants of a…
The Word: Rhetorics of Resistance in Westworld and The Handmaid’s Tale
By Emma Louise Backe Dolores Abernathy—titular host in HBO’s Westworld series—spends most of the second season with a gun on her hip and a constellation of blood spattering…
Immortality: no longer fiction?
The great unknown associated with dying has resulted in a societal fascination – no, obsession – with death. Death is everywhere from our newsfeeds, to our music, to…
Toying with Our Teleologies: Reflections on What SF Can Do for Anthropology
By Priya Chandrasekaran, Taylor C. Nelms, Valerie Olson, Elizabeth Reddy, Heather Thomas, and Nicholas Welcome At the annual meetings of the American Anthropological Association in late 2017, a…
Hobbes the Science Fiction Writer (Part II)
In Part I, I explored how Hobbes’s myth was a kind of science fiction story designed convince his readers to end the English Civil War by accepting peace…
Hobbes the Science Fiction Writer (Part I)
It is common to meet people who believe that much of the world is beset by “tribalism” and that the only thing holding back the chaos of a…