Science Fiction and Communism

Call for Papers

LAST YEAR we proposed a discussion within an analytical framework connecting the narratives of future in Science Fiction and the political reality of the Cold war. The final selection included 22 papers from 14 countries, covering a wide range of thematically and geographically diverse topics, including talks from science fiction (SF) experts Darko Suvin, Helena Goscilo and Miglena Nikolchina. The result was an interdisciplinary discussion which expanded the topic of the conference, pointing out that we can read the communist politics in and around SF, as much as the opposite - SF was a genre of relative freedom allowing certain degree of ideological resistance. Furthermore, the political appropriations of the future go beyond the Eastern block and are an integral part of the, then “western” culture, thus entangling the genre of futuristic stories in a global system of competing values.

While we have titled the conference “Communism” we very much agree that the communist system was part of a global regime of political division, thus we are welcoming papers on topics from both east and west.

The discussion is not limited to the strict literary and artistic genre SF. In the Slavic languages the term fantastika serves as an all-encompassing concept for everything futuristic, fairytale, fantasy, weird fiction, and so on and in 2007 HHH proposed the concept to be used as a broader category. In a similar way we want to include various practices of projecting the future beyond the limits of the SF genre. However, Darko Suvin argues that SF stands out for its social commentary and Ray Bradbury claims that “fantasy is fairytales and SF concerns reality”, thus we invite proposals concerning practices and narratives of the future which reflect the reality of the Communist regime and the Cold war.