Culture’s Futures

Science Fiction, Form and the Problem of Culture

Eric Aronoff

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2025
• Print ISBN:
  9783031804298
• eBook ISBN:
  9783031804304
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

This book argues that science fiction has been a key participant, along with anthropology and literary theory, in the interdisciplinary debates over "culture" and narrative form from the modernist period to the present. Both science fiction and the anthropological ethnography, in their modernist forms and post-modern/postcolonial reinventions, are intertwined technologies for constructing "culture" and difference through narrative worldbuilding.  This book traces the ways SF authors -- including Ray Bradbury, Ursula K. Le Guin, and Octavia E. Butler, as well as Indigenous futurists  Craig Strete, Celu Amberstone, Rebecca Roanhorse and Cherie Dimaline -- have deployed, interrogated and revised these models of "culture," representation and power to imagine new futures. 

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1. Introduction: Science Fiction, Anthropology, and the Problem of Culture
• 2. Aliens, Anthropologists, and American Indians: Ray Bradbury’s The Martian Chronicles, Modernist Anthropology and the Idea of Culture
• 3. Well-Wrought Cultures and Carrier Bags: Forms of Culture in Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness and Always Coming Home
• 4. Captivity, Conversion, Culture: Octavia E. Butler’s Genre-tic Engineering of Ethnography and Science Fiction in the Xenogenesis Trilogy
• 5. Resisting Culture: Culture and/as Sovereignty in Indigenous Futurisms
• 6. Coda: Culture’s Futures
• Back Matter