John Rieder

An exploration of contemporary speculative fiction's power to intervene in social, political, and environmental crises, this book demonstrates how the genre acts as a defense in the navigation of propagated falsehoods and the denial of firmly established scientific evidence. Speculative fiction thrives on the creation of counterworlds that challenge status quo assumptions about what is possible – but it calls for a willing suspension of disbelief from the first page. In the face of conspiracy theories, election fraud claims, holocaust and climate change denials and vaccine resistance running roughshod over previously established fact, reality has seen lies advanced and accepted as truth on a massive scale. Trapped as we are in this current moment, the critical potential of speculative fiction is all the more important as it enables us to sidestep the barriers to dialogue raised by dogmatism and to imagine possibilities that can help us “escape” from fantastic right-wing demagoguery as well as the effects of normalizing the unconscionable and the disastrous. In this optimistic appraisal of speculative fiction, John Rieder argues that the genre cannot carry the load by itself but must be supplemented by professional criticism and pedagogy within the institutional settings of secondary and higher education. Through readings of fiction by Amal El Mohtar and Max Gladstone How to Lose the Time War, N. K. Jemisin's Broken Earth Trilogy, China Miéville's The City and the City alongside works by Minsoo Kang, Ann Leckie, Arkady Martine, and Rivers Solomon, Truth, Lies and Speculation illuminates how left-leaning intellectuals throughout the world can walk the line between despair at the apparent impotence of truth and outrage at the manifest power of lies.

Confronting Dogmatism, Demagoguery, and Disinformation

Truth, Lies, and Speculative Fiction

Valerie Wayne

Joseph H. O'Mealy

Joseph Keene Chadwick taught at the University of Hawai'i until his untimely death at the age of thirty-seven in 1992. He was a gifted teacher and scholar of Irish literature. He was also an early advocate for gay studies and Pacific literature, and an accomplished translator. In addition to many published essays on these topics, he left an unfinished book manuscript on William Butler Yeats' theory of tragedy. This volume, which includes two chapters from his book on Yeats, presents Chadwick's early interventions into the areas of Irish and gay studies and translation alongside commisioned essays and work by contemporary scholars and writers, including Frank McGuinness, Witi Ihimaera, George Haggerty, and Elizabeth Butler Cullingford.

Interventions and Continuities in Irish and Gay Studies

Joseph Keene Chadwick

Speculative Epistemologies is about truth effects in sf, which stands for both science fiction and speculative fiction. It examines six narratives, one from each decade from the 1960s to the 2010s, that challenge dominant assumptions about the normal, the possible, and the real. It asks what the patterns of overlap and interference generated by texts located in border territories that make their identification as sf problematic, and sometimes controversial, can reveal about the dynamics of sf's multiple subcultures (e.g. professionals, academics, and fans); the complexity of the genre's communities of practice and their routes of production, distribution, and reception; and the genre's shifting position within a broadly conceived field of literary and cultural production. The "speculative epistemologies" in these stories arecounter-hegemonic ways of knowing, ways of imagining knowing differently, and the focus of this study is their effect on the formation of identities and communities. Combining the methods of genre theory, reception theory, and the sociology of cultural production, the readings of these six narratives trace a history of sf's increasingly feminist, racially and ethnically diverse, philosophically ambitious, and politically engaged character from the 1960s to the present.

An Eccentric Account of SF from the 1960s to the Present

Speculative Epistemologies

Arguing throughout that Wordsworth's originality springs from his invention and elaboration of a peculiarly literary form of community, Rieder maintains that the didactic element in Wordsworth's concept of community was doomed to irrelevance by the course of English economic and social development. Yet, Wordsworth's writing became enormously influential, not by virtue of the agrarian community it envisioned, but rather by virtue of the literary form of community it modeled and produced in its dissemination.

Community, Virtue, and Vision in the 1790s

Wordsworth's Counterrevolutionary Turn

Groundbreaking study of science fiction's relation to colonialism and imperialism This is the first full-length study of emerging Anglo-American science fiction's relation to the history, discourses, and ideologies of colonialism and imperialism. Nearly all scholars and critics of early science fiction acknowledge that colonialism is an important and relevant part of its historical context, and recent scholarship has emphasized imperialism's impact on late Victorian Gothic and adventure fiction and on Anglo-American popular and literary culture in general. John Rieder argues that colonial history and ideology are crucial components of science fiction's displaced references to history and its engagement in ideological production. He proposes that the profound ambivalence that pervades colonial accounts of the exotic "other" establishes the basic texture of much science fiction, in particular its vacillation between fantasies of discovery and visions of disaster. Combining original scholarship and theoretical sophistication with a clearly written presentation suitable for students as well as professional scholars, this study offers new and innovative readings of both acknowledged classics and rediscovered gems. Includes discussion of works by Edwin A. Abbott, Edward Bellamy, Edgar Rice Burroughs, John W. Campbell, George Tomkyns Chesney, Arthur Conan Doyle, H. Rider Haggard, Edmond Hamilton, W. H. Hudson, Richard Jefferies, Henry Kuttner, Alun Llewellyn, Jack London, A. Merritt, Catherine L. Moore, William Morris, Garrett P. Serviss, Mary Shelley, Olaf Stapledon, and H. G. Wells.

Colonialism and the Emergence of Science Fiction

Larry E. Smith

Selected Essays

Multiculturalism and Representation

Selected Conference Papers

Changing Representations of Minorities, East and West

This is the first full-length study of emerging Anglo-American science fiction’s relation to the history, discourses, and ideologies of colonialism and imperialism. Nearly all scholars and critics of early science fiction acknowledge that colonialism is an important and relevant part of its historical context, and recent scholarship has emphasized imperialism’s impact on late Victorian Gothic and adventure fiction and on Anglo-American popular and literary culture in general. John Rieder argues that colonial history and ideology are crucial components of science fiction’s displaced references to history and its engagement in ideological production. He proposes that the profound ambivalence that pervades colonial accounts of the exotic “other” establishes the basic texture of much science fiction, in particular its vacillation between fantasies of discovery and visions of disaster. Combining original scholarship and theoretical sophistication with a clearly written presentation suitable for students as well as professional scholars, this study offers new and innovative readings of both acknowledged classics and rediscovered gems. Includes discussion of works by Edwin A. Abbott, Edward Bellamy, Edgar Rice Burroughs, John W. Campbell, George Tomkyns Chesney, Arthur Conan Doyle, H. Rider Haggard, Edmond Hamilton, W. H. Hudson, Richard Jefferies, Henry Kuttner, Alun Llewellyn, Jack London, A. Merritt, Catherine L. Moore, William Morris, Garrett P. Serviss, Mary Shelley, Olaf Stapledon, and H. G. Wells.

In Science Fiction and the Mass Cultural Genre System, John Rieder asks literary scholars to consider what shape literary history takes when based on a historical, rather than formalist, genre theory. Rieder starts from the premise that science fiction and the other genres usually associated with so-called genre fiction comprise a system of genres entirely distinct from the pre-existing classical and academic genre system that includes the epic, tragedy, comedy, satire, romance, the lyric, and so on. He proposes that the field of literary production and the project of literary studies cannot be adequately conceptualized without taking into account the tensions between these two genre systems that arise from their different modes of production, distribution, and reception. Although the careful reading of individual texts forms an important part of this study, the systemic approach offered by Science Fiction and the Mass Cultural Genre System provides a fundamental challenge to literary methodologies that foreground individual innovation.

John Rieder

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