Even at their most bizarre, representations of alien sex are bound to reinscribe the terms of human desire. Thus there can be no representation of an alien sex act that is radically alien. However, for certain writers, this representational impasse provides an occasion for thinking through the limits of fictional and feminist representation. Through a reading of Monique Wittig's Les Guérillères, Samuel Delany's Trouble on Triton and Stars in My Pocket like Grains of Sand, and Angela Carter's The Passion of New Eve, I explore how alien sex is represented not only or even primarily in literal terms but also as an act that takes place in a fictional discursive milieu that critiques contemporary human sexual relations. I also describe how these writers' creative imaginings of alien sex function as a dialectical corollary to their theoretical investigations into the limits of representation.

Science fiction, ranging from films to industrial design to world's fairs, is a cultural system no more confined to literature than love is to love letters. From its self-recognition in 1926, science fiction has involved commercial and social realities most obviously visible in fandom and the hundreds of annual science fiction conventions. This system includes many types of consumers and producers, even collaboratively self-correcting volunteer bibliographers. Collectively, science fiction fandom, the first organized fandom, has created vast informational resources that allow not only reference but also statistical inquiry. The Genre Evolution Project (http://www.umich.edu/~genreevo/) shows that these social structures and resources potentiate, in an age of widespread computer networking, the transformation of criticism from acts of isolated scholars working with narrowly defined subjects to collaborative projects drawing on human and informational resources across disciplinary boundaries. Science fiction points to a future in which criticism will be more systematic, collaborative, and quantitative.

This essay is a feminist, historical exploration of body parts in short science fiction stories by women. In early-twentieth-century stories about prostheses, blood transfusion, and radioactive experiments, Clare Winger Harris, Kathleen Ludwick, and Judith Merril use body parts to explore fears of damage to masculine identity by war, of alienation of men from women, and of racial pollution. In stories from the last quarter of the twentieth century, the South American author Angélica Gorodischer depicts a housewife's escape from oppressive domestic technology through time travel in which she murders male leaders, while Eileen Gunn offers a critique of bioengineering and sociobiology, satirizing fears of women in modern business and of erasure of identity in global corporate structures. An end-of-the-century fiction by the African American Akua Lezli Hope imagines a black woman altered through cosmetic surgery to become a tenor sax and critiques technologies that transform women's bodies into cultural signifiers of social function and class.

Whereas first-generation theorists of virtual reality tended to regard simulated worlds as separate from real life, current trends in miniaturization, implants, wearable computers, and embedded sensors have shifted the emphasis to “mixed realities” mingling computationally intensive simulations with input from the real world. Contemporary films and novels have mirrored this trend, creating a blend of simulations mixed with everyday reality that Bruce Sterling has called “slipstream fiction.” To explore this phenomenon, we analyze three films that mix simulation with reality: The Thirteenth Floor, Dark City, and Mulholland Drive. These films present themselves initially as murder mysteries, but this pose quickly gives way to even more serious concerns, about the ontological status of the represented worlds. The narrative configurations suggest that when death is no longer the plots' logical end point, storytelling techniques undergo significant transformation, subverting usual assumptions about chronology, subjectivity, and topology and requiring new interpretive techniques.

This essay begins by asserting the importance of Joanna Russ as an American writer of the second half of the twentieth century. Her feminist concerns and her stylistic bravura are examined, as are the ways in which she deals with the socioeconomic construction of power in orde r to transcend any uncritical biological essentialism. The second half of the essay considers the context of two phrases that occur in D. W. Griffith's film Intolerance and also in Russ's writing: “hill girl” and “the female man” (The Female Man is the title of one of Russ's novels). The possibility that Griffith's film is Russ's textual source for these phrases is considered.

Like the automobile industry, the science fiction industry overproduces. Increasingly, the science fiction label is intended to fit every model. “Any color as long as it's colorful.”

I'm not a science fiction expert. Nor am i an academic, although i used to be one, sort of. Although I'm a writer, I'm not primarily a writer of science fiction. In this genre I'm a dilettante and a dabbler, an amateur—which last word, rightly translated, means “lover.” I got into hot water recently on a radio talk show in Britain: the radio person said she'd just been to a sci-fi conference there, and some people were really, really mad at me. Why? said I, mystified. For being mean to science fiction, said she. In what way had I been mean? I asked. For saying you didn't write it, she replied. And I having had the nerve to win the Arthur C. Clarke Award for Science Fiction.

It is widely accepted todaythat, whenever we receive or produce culture, we do so from a certain position and that such location influences how we theorize about and read the world. Because I am an Italian trained in the United States (specializing in American modernism) in the 1980s, my reading of science fiction has been shaped by my cultural and biographical circumstances as well as by my geography. It is a hybrid approach, combining these circumstances primarily with an interest in feminist theory and in writing by women. From the very beginning I have foregrounded issues of genre writing as they intersect with gender and the deconstruction of high and low culture. Such an approach, however, must also come to terms with the political and cultural circumstances that characterize this turn of the century.

As has been said many times before, South Africa is a land of contrasts: Between races, landscapes, economic strata, political viewpoints, and lifestyles. A complex contrast, but one that is relevant to science fiction, is the disparity between levels of technological literacy. Some of the country's population have access to advanced technology, such as Internet connections and cell phones, but most citizens have a monthly income well below the comfort level. Illiteracy is extremely high, despite the efforts of a large number of educational organizations. The HIV/AIDS pandemic has reached crisis proportions; by 2010, approximately sixty-five percent of the country's adult population will have died of the disease if the current rate of infection continues unchecked. In this context, one cannot expect an advanced awareness of technological or scientific developments; neither can one assume even a basic acquaintance with published literature.

Synesthesia … one day in 1997 (soon after the national gallery acquired the picture), i walked up the familiar marble stairs, crossed the rotunda, and was confronted, for the first time, by George Stubbs's Whistlejacket, the stunning, naked portrait—no groom or rider, no landscape—of a chestnut Arabian stallion. I smelled the stable, horse manure, and leather, and I had the thrill of knowing what was happening inside my skull. How the attention response had sent a cloud of fire leaping through my brain, tugging on associated traces, map on map of firing and partially firing neurons springing back into existence (never the same twice, yet continuous with my earliest childhood and the millions of years before that). Surprise and the power of the artist were making me read internal stimulus as external: recall had become once again perception (McCrone 194-217). This is an iconic memory for me. It holds, packed down and ready to unfold, both the direction my work has taken through my career and the context of that work: my own life and times; the history that made me; the Next Big Thing in science; and my privileged, difficult position as a science fiction writer, an arts graduate, and a woman.

In the dreams our stuff is made of, Thomas M. Disch talks about the influence and pervasiveness of science Fiction in American culture and asserts the genre's power in “such diverse realms as industrial design and marketing, military strategy, sexual mores, foreign policy, and practical epistemology” (11-12). A few years earlier, Sharona Ben-Tov described science fiction as “a peculiarly American dream”—that is, “a dream upon which, as a nation, we act” (2). Recently, Kim Stanley Robinson has claimed that “rapid technological development on all fronts combined to turn our entire social reality into one giant science fiction novel, which we are all writing together in the great collaboration called history” (1-2). While such diagnostic statements may ring true to American ears, they cannot be taken at face value in the context of Hellenic culture. Despite the unprecedented speed with which the Greeks absorb and consume both the latest technologies (like satellite TV, video, CD and DVD players, electronic games, mobile and cordless phones, PCs, and the Internet) and Hollywood's science fiction blockbuster films, neither technology per se nor science fiction has yet saturated the Greek mind-set to a degree that makes daily life a science-fictional reality. Greek politicians do not consult science fiction writers for military strategy and foreign policy decisions or depend on imaginary scenarios to shape their country's future. Contemporary Hellenic culture does not acquire its national pride from mechanical devices or space conquest. Contrary to the American popular belief that technology is the driving force of history, “a virtually autonomous agent of change” (Marx and Smith xi), the Greek view is that a complex interplay of political, economic, cultural, and technoscientific agencies alters the circumstances of daily life. No hostages to technological determinism, modern Greeks increasingly interface with high-tech inventions, but without locating earthly paradise in their geographic territory and without writing their history or shaping their social reality as “one giant science fiction novel.”

The “particular cultural and political circumstances in which i write” have changed decisively several times in my life. I have been several times an expatriate and finally an émigré from Yugoslavia, and I am now an expatriate from Canada—a life that has made me very attuned to global material and moral changes. I shall focus on the changes that I personally felt as inciding deeply into my professional work in the last ten years or so, the watershed for me being the illegal and immoral bombing of Serbia led by the United States. By then I had published three books on science fiction—Metamorphoses of Science Fiction (1979), Victorian Science Fiction in the U.K. (1983), and Positions and Presuppositions in Science Fiction (1988)—and written enough further essays for a fourth book, which was scrapped when the Liverpool University Press had its budget cut. The changes make me, alas, the bearer of bad news, for as I see it our rulers have in practice destroyed the wall that our disciplines wrongly thought existed between culture and political economics, and we had better draw the consequences. And yet the gesture and bearing (see Suvin, “Haltung”) of writing this report also imply a hope that with much clarity, work, and luck we intellectuals—writers and then critics—can make an important difference.

The 2003 Guber natorial recall campaign in California was a perfect political storm. The extraordinary result—the democratic removal of a sitting governor before his term expired (for the first time in California history and the second time in United States history) and his replacement by a bodybuilder turned movie star with not the slightest governmental experience—depended on the improbable conjuncture of several factors, each pretty odd in itself: the special severity with which the Bush recession hit the California economy, largely because of the latter's unusual dependence on high-tech corporations; the California power crisis engineered by Enron and other denizens of the Houston energy industry; the astonishing charmlessness of Governor Gray Davis, whose political career had been based not on attracting strong loyalty or admiration but on fund-raising, negative campaigning, and convincing core Democratic constituencies that he was marginally less repellant than Republican alternatives; the willingness of the multimillionaire United States congressman Daryl Issa to spend two million dollars of his own money to get the recall on the ballot in the first place; and, of course, the overwhelming star power of Arnold Schwarzenegger. One might suppose that the evident contingency of the whole matter precludes finding historical importance in it. It is after all possible, even likely, in what Guy Debord brilliantly analyzed as la société du spectacle, for an event to be sensational without being tremendously significant.

Boston, on the coast of lincolnshire, is a handsome town, writes his man. The tallest church steeple in all of England is to be found there; sea-pilots use it to navigate by. Around Boston is fen country. Bitterns abound, ominous birds who give a heavy, groaning call loud enough to be heard two miles away, like the report of a gun.