JFA 34.1 – Table of Contents
Breaking the Glass Ceiling: Thriving as a Nigerian Female Artist in a Predominantly Male Industry
Emma Nyra
I Am Legend & Mad Max: Fury Road: New Subjectivities After the End of the World
Evdokia Stefanopoulou
Reading Roxane Gay’s “Requiem for a Glass Heart” from a Disability Perspective
Kari Hanson-Park
Female SF, Porridge SF, and Sinopedia: Xia Jia and Genres of Contemporary Chinese Science Fiction
Regina Kanyu Wang
Disrupting the Nascent Paradigm of Urban Automobility in H. G. Wells’s The Sleeper Awakes
Jeremy Withers
Changeling the Outcome: Fairy-Tale Framing and the Ethics of Care in Michelle Lovretta’s Killjoys
Christina Fawcett
A Monstrous Correspondence: Letters Between Frankenstein and Dracula
Callum Browne
“A Ghost Can Be a Lot of Things”: The Allocation of Horror in The Haunting of H[ill] House
Anelise Haukaas
“Somebody to Love”: The Queer Possibilities of Amazon Prime’s Good Omens
Linda Wight
Bible Fantasy and Modern Israeli Fantasy: The Case of “The War of the Kings”
Hagai Dagan
“I was Wary of that Tracery of Words, as if Somehow They Could Hurt Me”: Intrusive Words and Posthumanist Horror in Jeff VanderMeer’s Annihilation
Maggie White
Do Androids Dream of Wars and Climate Change? India’s Futures in Three Hindi “Large Short” Films
Sami Ahmad Khan
Enabling Artistry
Melody Mennite Walsh
REVIEWS
Simon Bacon’s Eco-Vampires: The Undead and the Environment
Rev. by Amanda Firestone
Mike Ashley’s The Rise of the Cyberzines: the Story of the Science-Fiction Magazines from 1991-2020
Rev. by Farah Mendlesohn
T. Boffone and C. Herrera’s Nerds, Goths, Geeks, and Freaks: Outsiders in Chicanx and Latinx Young Adult Literature
Rev. by Genesis Pabon
Samantha Lindop’s The Stepford Wives
Rev. by Pedro Ponce
Abstracts
Evdokia Stefanopoulou
I Am Legend & Mad Max: Fury Road: New Subjectivities After the End of the World
This article explores articulations of the posthuman in two millennial post-apocalyptic films, I Am Legend and Mad Max: Fury Road. Using Rosi Braidotti’s posthuman theory, this article argues that despite the humanist trajectory of I Am Legend’s protagonist the film still expresses the notion of becoming-posthuman but in a latent form—through specific narrative and visual elements, but also via its alternate ending. This research labels these concealed expressions of the posthuman“latent posthumanism,” a tendency that is also evident in most contemporary Hollywood post-apocalyptic films with male leads. The essay then moves on to discuss Mad Max: Fury Road, as a rare case of blockbuster film where this latent posthumanism becomes explicit mainly through its female protagonist and its ecofeminist discourses. Both films suggest the potential of the post-apocalyptic film to provide important insights into expanded notions of subjectivity beyond the human.
Kari Hanson-Park
Reading Roxane Gay’s “Requiem for a Glass Heart” from a Disability Perspective
The many fascinating fictional narratives in Roxane Gay’s short story collection Difficult Women vary widely in form, with realist narratives set alongside fantastic representations. One of the fantastic stories, “Requiem for a Glass Heart,” describes the lives of a woman made of glass, her flesh-and-bone husband (who is called “the stone thrower”), their glass son, and the various ways in which the glassness of the woman and her son affects their daily lives and family dynamics. Rather than taking the obvious gender-focused approach, this article argues that the story can be read fruitfully from a disability studies perspective. Specifically, this essay argues that a disability-focused approach provides a compelling interpretive explanation for the benevolent discrimination the stone thrower engages in against his wife and child. Taking a disability studies approach to this story can open the door to including disability among the diverse ways of being that are represented in Gay’s collection.
Regina Kanyu Wang
Female SF, Porridge SF, and Sinopedia: Xia Jia and Genres of Contemporary Chinese Science Fiction
This paper looks at the phenomenon of increasing attention towards female sf (nüxing kehuan) in the Chinese sf genre and uses Xia Jia’s practice and works to seek an approach to studying female sf in China without essentializing it. It first maps out the female sf scene in the Chinese context, the dilemma it faces, and the similarity with the double-edged sword of Chinese sf. Then this article examines how Xia Jia takes the marginality of porridge sf to break away from the dilemma and transcend the genre/gender/cultural hierarchy. Finally, this article focuses on Xia Jia’s Sinopedia series and analyze how it uses intertextuality, narrative experiment, and technology imagination to build three layers of nets that connect all things, transgressing dominant knowledge and establishing a new order of things. It also argues that Sinopedia enriches the grand narratives about China and works better than Sinofuturism to join the construction of CoFutures.
Jeremy Withers
Disrupting the Nascent Paradigm of Urban Automobility in H. G. Wells’s The Sleeper Awakes
Despite the gloomy nature of H. G. Wells’s The Sleeper Awakes, this essay argues that adjacent to the novel’s dystopian displays of oppressive social stratification and technologies of thought-control readers encounter utopian images too. More specifically, this article argues that Wells provides in this novel an early and important vision of a sprawling megacity that has adopted more utopian forms of mobility and transportation, forms that have allowed it to flourish without embracing automobility. In place of motor cars, people in The Sleeper Awakes traverse the space of the city by means of an intraurban transit system that the novel shows to be more egalitarian and collectivist, as well as less polluting, than the automobiles that were emerging at that time.
Christina Fawcett
Changeling the Outcome: Fairy-Tale Framing and the Ethics of Care in Michelle Lovretta’s Killjoys
Michelle Lovretta’s SyFy series Killjoys (2015-2019) uses a repetitious storytelling cue to signal the series’ reliance on fairy-tales: “When the nights were long and the days were deep…” This fairy-tale framework rewrites the protagonist, making the chiral a changeling; viewers can then read this fragmented fairy-tale’s moral focus on connection, emotional and relationality. Considering the social and moral history of the fairy-tale and its long didactic purpose, this article argues that reading the protagonist as changeling is core to the show’s function. The interwoven genre containers generate a more complex, layered meaning for a show that appears on first glance a simple Space Opera. The feminist push against hierarchical, rational and individualist justice centers a warrior who operates between genres and worlds to celebrate connection and the ethics of care.
Callum Browne
A Monstrous Correspondence: Letters Between Frankenstein and Dracula
The relationship between form, narrative structure, and the epistemological concerns associated with realism is an area rarely examined in studies of fantasy texts, particularly those from the nineteenth century. This essay endeavours to place two such novels – Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and Bram Stoker’s Dracula – into their historical and philosophical context and use their formal similarities, in particular their exploitation of the epistolary form, as a point of reference through which to analyse their relationship with realism. Using a range of critical sources, historical context, and taking some of Jacques Derrida’s early work as a theoretical lens, this article charts a progression from attempts by Shelley to sidestep epistemological concerns entirely, through to the more critical dialogue with realism represented by Stoker. This article outlines a possible route into a more complete historicisation of this often overlooked area of fantasy scholarship.
Anelise Haukaas
“A Ghost Can Be a Lot of Things”: The Allocation of Horror in The Haunting of H[ill] House
The television series The Haunting of Hill House (2018), loosely based on Shirley Jackson’s 1959 novel of the same name, has received attention for the way it thoughtfully depicts trauma and grief, yet what is so significant about the series often goes overlooked: its unique portrayal of mental illness in the horror genre. After first explaining the troubled history of disability in horror, this article focuses on three major aspects of Hill House: how it examines the relationship between reality and mental illness, how it portrays the everyday challenges of mental illness, and how it villainizes Steven Crain. By not only engaging with the complexities of mental illness but also reallocating the horror to Steven and his ableism, rather than disability itself, the television series offers a positive model for mental illness representation in horror.
Linda Wight
“Somebody to Love”: The Queer Possibilities of Amazon Prime’s Good Omens
This article analyzes the queer possibilities of season 1 of Amazon Prime’s Good Omens (2019),focusing on the tender and enduring relationship between two primarily male-presenting celestial beings: Aziraphale (an angel) and Crowley (a demon). Reflecting on the concerns raised by some commentators about the ambivalent representation of their relationship, this essay discusses the extent to which the characters can be read as gay and the problems that such a reading might expose. It then undertakes a reading of Good Omens through a broader queer lens to argue that the series can be read as an exploration and celebration of non-binary gender fluidity and queer relationships, identities and desires beyond the homosexual/ heterosexual binary.
Hagai Dagan
Bible Fantasy and Modern Israeli Fantasy: The Case of “The War of the Kings”
“The war of Kings” (Genesis 14) is an episode that appears to be a part of biblical chronology. However, underneath the seemingly factual text appears a wondrous and strange story that retains an elusive quality. The paper presents the story as a unique example of biblical fantasy, reminiscent of some modern fantasy works and aligned with some models proposed in fantasy theory, such as Farah Mendlesohn’s “intrusion fantasy.” In the second part, the paper shows how the Israeli fantasy writer Shimon Adaf handles this story. Adaf differs from other Israeli fantasy writers in the sense that his approach to tradition is not hostile, ironic or sarcastic. He proposes a fantasy that might be regarded as attentive and connected to the past. He also aspires to create a very “local” fantasy, one that would use the unique language of fantasy literature to enable a bridge between modernity and the Jewish past. He adopts the Genesis 14 story due to its ambiguity, mystery, and references to a mythical, ancient past. In this sense Adaf, as a modern fantasy writer, identifies fantastic layers in the biblical story itself and uses these to create a literary dialog: a dialog between fantasies.
Maggie White
“I was Wary of that Tracery of Words, as if Somehow They Could Hurt Me”: Intrusive Words and Posthumanist Horror in Jeff VanderMeer’s Annihilation
Jeff Vandermeer’s 2014 SFF novel Annihilation is widely acknowledged as a work of posthumanist and ecocritical fiction, but little regard has been given to its engagement with linguistics. By examining the content and rhetoric of the novel alongside posthumanist scholarship and the emerging field of biopoetics, especially the work of Cary Wolfe and Andreas Weber, this essay posits that much of VanderMeer’s posthumanist critique resides in challenging the Eurocentric notion of human exceptionalism via language. He does this largely by granting linguistic function to non-human entities, a function that possesses a transformative power over humans who encounter it. Farah Mendlesohn’s outline of what she calls intrusion fantasy, with its strong relation to the horror genre, serves as this essay’s structural map. Exemplified through a number of close readings, VanderMeer’s evocation of linguistic-based posthumanist anxieties appears to place the novel within the emerging field of biopoetics.
Sami Ahmad Khan
Do Androids Dream of Wars and Climate Change? India’s Futures in Three Hindi “Large Short” Films
India’s Science Fiction (SF) manifests, magnifies, and mutates distortions in our consensual reality; it exhibits a sustained engagement with social, political, and environmental concerns while utilizing and appropriating established SF topoi. This essay studies three Hindi-language “large short” SF films produced between 2017-2018. These are narratives which operate at the cusp of mainstream and alternative, a contentious location vis-à-vis SF in India (and India in SF), and between present and future threats. It deploys the novum as a framework to investigate how India’s science fictional imaginaries negotiate ruptures precipitated by emergent technologies (AI, space colonization), environmental anxieties (depletion of natural resources, pollution), and geopolitical tectonics (CBRN warfare) in three films, which herald the shape of things to come in South Asia, as well as projecting alternative modes of storytelling that could prevent/precipitate dystopias and manifest radically new ways of social and political organization.