...Angela S. Allan Abstract This article reads Michael Crichton's Jurassic Park (1990) and Chang-rae Lee's On Such a Full Sea (2014) as works of speculative fiction that engage with the scientific concept of “the system” that emerged during the latter half of the twentieth century. It tracks...

...John Plotz This piece asks what relation the turn toward a new era of patrimonial capitalism—traced in Thomas Piketty's recent work—bears to the modern rise of fantasy worlds and speculative fiction. The problem of justifying distinction in a world that presumes common humanity beneath surface...

...Matthew Hart Abstract This essay considers a late novel sequence by the British speculative fiction writer J. G. Ballard (1930–2009). Although Ballard is often celebrated as a great iconoclast, there is arguably no postwar novelist with a more recognizable style. The essay analyzes Cocaine Nights...

.... Field theory envisions money's value as arising from and shifting with the market or social environment from which it arises. This essay examines how the field theory of money can be linked with money's role in three contemporary examples of speculative fiction: Hari Kunzru's Gods Without Men , Tom...

... by documenting the affinities between planetarity's redemptive, world-building ambitions, on one hand, and both Kantian cosmopolitanism and turn-of-the-twentieth-century articulations of “planetary consciousness” (as particularly evident in speculative fiction) on the other. The common denominator...

... in the Speculative Fiction of Octavia Butler and Samuel Delany.” Rethinking History 9 . 2–3 ( 2005 ): 275 – 96 . Cenzatti Marco . “Heterotopias of Difference.” Heterotopia and the City: Public Space in a Postcivil Society . Ed. Dehaene Michael De Cauter Lieven . London : Routledge...

... enigmatic photographs that allow plenty of play for the observer's imaginative speculation (including work by Jeff Wall, Justine Kurland, Lynne Cohen, and Connie Samaras), I ask why there should be such a discrepancy between fictional and nonfictional understandings of the work that can be done...

...Lisa Zunshine My essay emphasizes the social aspect of our engagement with fictional narratives by drawing on cognitive scientists' research into “theory of mind,” also known as “mind reading”: our evolved adaptation for explaining people's behavior in terms of their mental states, such as thoughts...

...Bill Solomon This essay adopts Susan Stewart's notion of distressed genres as a way to interrogate the seemingly nostalgic strain of American modernist fiction produced in the early decades of the twentieth century. The first section reads Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio alongside Walter...

... inclination toward retrospection. Comparable forms of nostalgia for the Edwardian period persist in 1930s fiction and are explored in this essay, along with an inheritance of modernist narrative techniques, in novels including The Memorial, Eyeless in Gaza, A Scots Quair , and Coming Up for Air . The essay...

... recent special issue of the Journal of American Studies , titled “Fictions of Speculation,” interest in the form of finance's proleptic and analeptic reorganizations of temporal experience leads to a focus on the close fit between financial speculation and speculative fiction's expertise in “what-wasn't...

... and sociological impact—as a means of structuring not only social relations but the novelistic form. Looking at a recent crop of speculative fiction—Hari Kunzru's 2011 Gods Without Men , Tom McCarthy's 2005 Remainder , and Ian McEwan's 2019 The Cockroach —Trimm asks us to consider the extent to which...

... generic output. It is becoming conventional among such critics not only to observe the emergence of significant contributors to the genre, like Okorafor, but also to indicate that the speculative quality inherent in science fiction may be located in African media more generally. Key generic terms like...

...—namely, that of the unsettling combination of serious content with ironic and comedic tone or manner that particularly marks her speculative fiction. For a novel whose first Canadian edition featured a T. S. Eliot–like parched, barren desert landscape on the cover and whose plot imagines...

... Anthropocene terraforming urban ecology urban literature speculative fiction When we think of “the land” and its literary representations, what usually comes to mind are the rural landscapes of Thomas Hardy or Willa Cather, the wild landscapes of James Fenimore Cooper, the social meanings of land...

... Economy of Property in Austen’s Emma.” Eighteenth-Century Fiction 2 ( 1990 ): 229 –54. Tuite , Clara . Romantic Austen: Sexual Politics and the Literary Canon . Cambridge: Cambridge UP "AFall in Bread": Speculation and the Real in Emma...

... exist . . . that attempts to make discernable the shape of an unrealizable technological culture,” before proposing “a genre of ‘speculative fiction’ around virtual arts: Keatsian music; a painting that never dries” ( “Actual World” ). 5 10:04 has also been received as an example...

... into equivalence of character, interiority, and interpersonal communication with the inhuman formalism of systems. Jewett is writing dispatches to us from an alien country, and in doing so she is helping to write it into being. We might think of the novel as both an anthropology and a speculative fiction...

... in the utopia/catastrophe school of speculative fiction (say, Ignatius Donnelly's Caesar's Column [1890Parable of the Sower is essentially a critique of "civilization and its discontents." Freud's analysis of the link between class society and the psychic disintegration...

...Audrey Jaffe WAGNER TAMARA , Financial Speculation in Victorian Fiction: Plotting Money and the Novel Genre ( Columbus : Ohio State UP , 2010 ), pp. 232 , cloth, $44.95 . © 2012 by Novel, Inc. 2012 Duke University Press Plotting Speculation...