Feminism, Fans, and the Future: Traveling the Shifting Worlds of Writers, Readers, Gender, and Race

I'm off to the SFRA conference, which is being held in conjunction with Wiscon in Wisconsin, Madison from May the 22nd - 25th. This'll be my first time in America, and it's especially exciting having been recently appointed the editor of the SFRA Review. My paper proposal is:

‘Then Came Pantropy’*: Bodily Adaptation and Human-Animal Relationships in Terraforming Narratives

The colonisation and habitation of planets calls for the physical adaptation of space (terraforming) or bodies (pantropy). Terraforming has often featured as the preferred method for adapting to the conditions of new worlds, but cyborgization and genetic engineering have also been imagined as alternatives or supplements to industrial terraforming strategies. Adapted animal and human bodies evoke the monstrous, grotesque and sublime; they interrogate the meaning of the animal, of the human, and of nature. Bodily modification, when viewed as grotesque and monstrous, opposes dominant terraforming agendas. When viewed as a harbinger of novelty, such as in the episode of the hatching egg in Robinson’s ‘Green Mars’, they index a sublime futurity.

I follow the example of Sherryl Vint’s Animal Alterity in bringing an approach influenced by Human-Animal Studies to science fiction. I consider the relationship between the human and animal in feminist terraforming narratives such as Joan Slonczewski’s A Door Into Ocean (1986) and Pamela Sargent’s Venus trilogy (1986-2001). Terraforming narratives such as these depend on the adaptation of life-forms (along with instances of modifications to humans themselves) in order to make their colonising project possible. That the world in Slonczewski story is dominated by a single ocean signals a fundamental difference to the way in which both adaptation to and modification of the environment can be conceived. Examining the intersection between the human and the animal will bring into focus the relationship between representations and orientations toward the planetary environment on the one hand, and its multiple inhabitants on the other, allowing us to explore both the significance of terraforming as an intervention into nature, and of pantropy as a counter-critique to terraforming as an appropriate model for habitation.

*Blish, James, The Seedling Stars (London: Gollancz, 2011).