The Realm of the Impossible: Planetary Conceptions of Space in Science Fiction and Fantasy

Science fiction and fantasy, viewed from a planetary perspective, navigate unsettled futurities that engage with colonial matrices of power (Mignolo), taking them to dystopian conclusions or pondering the emergence of hopeful outcomes. As Tiffany Lethabo King argues, the act of disordering “serves to contemplate what further death, devourment, or destruction awaits Native and Black peoples if settler colonialism remains intact” (13). Science fiction and fantasy may therefore use speculation narratives as cautionary tales of what will happen if the status quo of violent spaces remain. Alternatively, these genres also allow for the conception of a future through positive possibilities; Laura Harjo indeed questions how to “imagine futurity [in a way] that decolonizes how we engage with community to create a trajectory that has a beautiful path to a lush place” (47). Thus, science fiction and fantasy have the potential to resist oppressive modes of knowledge production, by means of politicizing otherwise ‘escapist’ literary genres. Octavia E. Butler’s short story “Bloodchild,” for instance, features an ambiguous vision of colonial spaces, in which the centralized theme of love blur the human gaze of what is embodied by sites of colonial violence. Thus, as Ursula K. Le Guin argues, science fiction and fantasy, as imaginative genres, are “a way of trying to describe what is in fact going on, what people actually do and feel, how people relate to everything else in this vast sack, this belly of the universe, this womb of things to be and tomb of things that were, this unending story” (Le Guin 170).

These genres therefore provide a look into the vastness of the planetary scope, as the Anthropocene entails a conception of space that transcends immediacy. Dipesh Chakrabarty indeed states that “[w]e humans never experience ourselves as a species. We can only intellectually comprehend or infer the existence of the human species but never experience it as such” (43). The unfathomable scale of the climate crisis and imperial conquests redefines the conception of space and the relationship of communities with the land. Since “the climate has always already been changed” (Canavan 5), science fiction and fantasy may provide opportunities to acknowledge our present by using derivative representations, accessible through (im)possible elements. Moreover, fantasy narratives also offer the possibility to imagine a completely different secondary world, where worldbuilding may both destabilize our sense of place, or ground it further. While science fiction and fantasy have long been considered as entertaining tales of heroism, authors and scholars are now seeking to complexify the dominant analysis of such popular works. Indeed, sagas such as J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings have recently been analysed through ecocritical and postcolonial lenses. In the case of Tolkien’s fiction, these approaches acknowledge ideas of resisting oppression, environmental destruction and industrialization, while also pointing out deep eurocentric views in his work. Similarly, space ventures and exo-narratives provide the possibility to interact with the vastness of the universe, either through criticism of imperial enterprises or through their justification. Terraforming (imperial) enterprises, whether fictional or not, can further be described as a “radical application of human-induced climate change” (Dumiak qtd in Pak 2). As such, planetary perspectives may challenge colonial and extractive practices about these well-loved works by bringing into focus the impacts of destruction and dispossession of land. Whether viewed from outer space, or from an imaginary secondary world, these real-world constructs have the potential to be defamiliarized, deconstructed, and reinterpreted, through these speculative and impossible stories.

Therefore, observing the connections between these popular science fiction and fantasy narratives, as well as their potential to navigate planetarity, one can ask the following questions:

• What possibilities can a planetary approach offer to the genres of science fiction and fantasy?
• How do science fiction and fantasy produce and interpret planetary-scale catastrophes?
• How do authors navigate the tensions between imagined futures that are potentially hopeful or bleak? How does it reflect our conception of the present?
• How do these works approach the dominant discourses in such popular settings; do authors fight colonial violence and environmental destruction, or does their work justify these practices?

This issue explores the intersection between works of science fiction and fantasy, and approaches such as postcolonialism, ecocriticism, ecofeminism, planetarity, and others. It investigates the ways in which creators and scholars use the imaginary to offer (hopeful) alternatives to increasingly unstable and violent spaces. The Harbour Journal is looking for full article submissions of up to 4500 to 6000 words, in French or in English, in fields of study including but not limited to:

-        Speculative fiction studies,

-        Science fiction and fantasy studies

-        Popular and Cultural studies

-        Literary Criticism

-        Translation and Adaptation studies

-        Film and Television studies

-        History

-        Planetary studies

Please send your full work with a set of keywords to theharboureditors@gmail.com by August 30th, 2024.

Articles must be submitted as a Word document, following the MLA formatting style, and include no personal identification (to ensure the confidentiality of the blind peer-review process).

Works Cited

Canavan,Gerry. “Introduction.” Green Planets : Ecology and Science Fiction, edited by Gerry Canavan, and Kim Stanley Robinson, Wesleyan University Press, 2014. ProQuest Ebook Central, https://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/umontreal-ebooks/detail.action?docID=1635427.

Chakrabarty, Dipesh. The Climate of History: In a Planetary Age. University of Chicago Press, 2021.

Harjo, Laura. Spiral to the Stars: Mvskoke Tools of Futurity. The University of Arizona Press, 2019.

Le Guin, Ursula K. “Talks and Essays.” Dancing at the Edge of The World: Thoughts on Words, Women, Places, Grove/Atlantic, 1997, pp. 165-70.

Lethabo King, Tiffany, et al., editors. Otherwise Worlds : Against Settler Colonialism and Anti-Blackness. Duke University Press, 2020, https://doi.org/10.1515/9781478012023.

Mignolo, Walter D. “What Does It Mean to Decolonize?” On Decoloniality. Catherine E. Walsh and Walter D. Mignolo. Duke University Press, 2018, pp. 105-134.

Pak, Chris. “Introduction: Terraforming: Engineering Imaginary Environments.” Terraforming: Ecopolitical Transformations and Environmentalism in Science Fiction, Liverpool University Press, 2016, pp. 1–17. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt1gpcb56.4.