Political Science Fiction

Political Science Fiction, edited by Donald M. Hassler and Clyde Wilcox, is a 1996 collection of essays on politics and science fiction.

Abstract: "Political Science Fiction examines the close relationship between politics and science fiction and shows how much of the former is grounded in the latter. Sixteen science fiction writers and critics join forces to offer an anthology that explores a diversity of futuristic literature, from the novels of H. G. Wells to Star Trek: The Next Generation, and a spectrum of ideas, from the libertarianism of Robert A. Heinlein to the feminism of Ursula K. LeGuin and Sheri S. Tepper. As the science fiction writer Frederik Pohl observes in the lead essay, the contributors collectively find science fiction to be either implicitly or explicitly political by its very nature. Equally divided between essays that analyze science fiction texts as literature and essays that discuss them as models of political science theory and practice, the collection reveals the propensity of fiction writers to center their works on particular governmental structures. Other essays reveal the ways in which science fiction speaks to the study,of international relations, such as the support for realist ideology found in the enormous genre of interspecies war novels and stories. Of particular interest to viewers of Star Trek, three essays deal specifically with the depiction of alien governments, gender identity, and isolationism in both the original and the new television series."

Contents

• Preface vii
• Introduction: Politics, Art, Collaboration / Donald M. Hassler & Clyde Wilcox - 1
• "The Politics of Prophecy" / Frederick Pohl - p.7
• "Swift, Pohl, and Kornbluth: Publicists Anatomize Newness" / Donald M. Hassler - p.18
• "H. G. Wells's A Modern Utopia as a Work in Progress" / June Deery - p.26
• "State, Heterotopia: The Political Imagination in Heinlein, Le Guin, and Delany" / Neil Easterbrook - p.43
  • "Neal Easterbrook's fascinating essay explores the role of the state and politics in Heinlein's The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress, Le Guin's The Dispossessed, and Samuel R. Delany's Triton. All three novels detail the struggle of an anarchic political system on one or more moons against the more traditional political system of the parent planet. Each explores the relationship of political systems (ranging from authoritarian to anarchic) and individual freedom. Easterbrook argues that each book provides a vital and sophisticated political commentary, and that taken together, the works expand our understanding of anarchic political theory."
• "The I-We Dilemma and a 'Utopian Unconscious' in Wells's When the Sleeper Wakes and Le Guin's The Lathe of Heaven" / Carol S. Franko - p.76
  • "... Carol S. Franko's essay hinges on the dilemma faced by feminists, who insist on the importance of the "I" in collective movements, for all collective action ignores the needs of individuals, and the importance of the "we" to moving from selfish individual liberation to collective political action. The discourse between these two concepts is examined in two utopian novels -- Wells's When the Sleeper Wakes and Le Guin's The Lathe of Heaven."
• "No Future! Cyberpunk, Industrial Music, and the Aesthetics of Postmodern Disintegration" / Patrick Novotny - p.99
• "Prince Versus Prophet: Machieavellianism in Frank Herbert's Dune Epic" / Peter Minowitz - p.124
• "Feminist Utopian Fiction and the Possibility of Social Critique" / Josephine Carubia Glorie - p.148
  • "The theory section concludes with Josephine Carubia Glorie's examination of the role of feminist utopian fiction as social critique. She suggests that the obvious contrast between the present and fictional worlds is not the only source of critique. In addition, many feminist utopian works suggest a world in which social and political conditions permit an ongoing, internal critique of the utopian culture. The conditions that permit this internal critique are critical to the success of most feminist utopian societies, and have been consciously created as a feminist method for political change."
• "Governing the Alien Nation: The Comparative Politics of Extraterrestrials" / Clyde Wilcox - p.160
• "Reality Transfigured: The Latin American Situation as Reflected in Its Science Fiction" / Ingrid Kreksch - p.173
• "'In Every Revolution, There Is One Man with a Vision': The Governments of the Future in Comparative Perspective" / Paul Christopher Manuel - p.183
• "Military, Democracy, and the State in Robert A. Heinlein's Starship Troopers" / Everett Carl Dolman - p.196
• "Gender Identity in Star Trek" / Kathy E. Ferguson, Gilad Ashkenazi, and Wendy Schultz - p.214
  • "Kathy Ferguson, Gilad Ashkenazi, and Wendy Schultz examine the gender politics of the original and later Star Trek series. They argue that Star Trek: The Next Generation sometimes succeeds in allowing the denaturalization of conventional gender boundaries and identities, which allows us to imagine a differently gendered world."
• "'We Owe It to Them to Interfere': Star Trek an U.S. Statecraft in the 1960s and the 1990s" / Mark P. Lagon - p.234
• Index - p.251

Editions

• 1996, University of South Carolina Press (256 pp.). ISBN 1570031134. ISBN-13: 978-1570031137.