Culture’s Futures Science Fiction, Form and the Problem of Culture

This book argues that science fiction has been a key participant, along with anthropology and literary theory, in the interdisciplinary debates over “culture” and narrative form from the modernist period to the present. Both science fiction and the anthropological ethnography, in their modernist forms and post-modern/postcolonial reinventions, are intertwined technologies for constructing “culture” and difference through narrative worldbuilding. This book traces the ways SF authors -- including Ray Bradbury, Ursula K. Le Guin, and Octavia E. Butler, as well as Indigenous futurists Craig Strete, Celu Amberstone, Rebecca Roanhorse and Cherie Dimaline -- have deployed, interrogated and revised these models of “culture,” representation and power to imagine new futures.