Bourgeois Novel, Realism — Science Fiction, Post-modernism — Visionary Fiction, Cataclysm

Combating the informatics of domination demands other ways to tell stories and imagine worlds. “A Cyborg Manifesto” calls up such possibilities in its invocation of Octavia E. Butler. This essay turns to N. K. Jemison’s Broken Earth Trilogy to explore how Black, queer, and decolonial imaginaries render the binary oppositions between realism and science fiction, modernism and postmodernism incomprehensible. “Visionary fiction, cataclysm” is the third term the essay invokes to think through these cultural formations and their capacity to rewrite the bourgeois science fiction realisms of the 2020s and beyond.