Introduction

Abstract

Speculative fiction encompasses various types of exploratory genres and media, including science-fiction, fantastic artworks, utopian and dystopian writing, weird fiction and film, as well as post-apocalyptic narratives in literature, on screen, and in video and online games. Depending on their research interests, scholars of speculative fiction across different media have outlined a variety of histories of the genre. Many of the literary texts evoked in these histories combine imaginaries of social and political organization with explorations of gender and issues of violence. For example, Thomas More's Utopia (Lat. 1516, Engl. 1551) imagines a more egalitarian society that nonetheless remains strictly patriarchal. It also imagines a perfect government that ensures prosperity and peace by fighting preventive wars, encouraging (assisted) suicide, administering the death penalty to adulterers, and promoting corporal punishment for unruly women and children. Margaret Cavendish's The Description of a New World, Called The Blazing-World (1666), a text in which women leaders bring about a utopian society through armed invasion, anticipates late 19th-century feminist utopian visions such as Mary Bradley Lane's  Mizora: A Prophecy (1880-81), where women's liberation is achieved through a state-driven biopolitical project of selective reproduction that eradicates both men and racial others. Mary Shelley's gothic novel Frankenstein; or the Modern Prometheus (1818) famously examines the gendered implications of creativity, science, and reproduction, but it can also be read as a commentary on different types of gendered violence and how they are perpetuated by formal and informal social institutions such as universities or the nuclear family. In H. G. Well's science fiction classic The Time Machine (1895), to give a final example, human beings have evolved into two separate but co-dependent species: the predatory Morlocks breed and slaughter the gentle Eloi, who no longer present recognizable gender differences, because, as Well's narrator notes, they are kept in a  pre-social and pre-political state of abundance in which competition and interpersonal violence is almost nonexistent, a fact that has made a "specialization of the sexes" obsolete.