Overview

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. 

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9783031804328

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Reviews

“In this interdisciplinary study of writers of ‘culture’ science fictions, Aronoff has given a very important and crucial compendium of approaching the dispersed and divergent problem of cultural polity and social framing in science fiction narratives. … this book is a crucial academic reference point for young scholars taking their first steps into unearthing the reasoning and execution of socio-cultural futurisms.” (Anusha Hegde, Journal of Comparative Literature and Aesthetics, Vol. 48 (4), 2025)

Author Information

Eric Aronoff is an Associate Professor of Humanities in the Residential College of Arts and Humanities at Michigan State University, USA. His areas of  expertise are modernist American literature and criticism, anthropology and literature, and theories of culture, as well as science fiction. Eric also has strong research interests in  literature and the environment.  His work has appeared in journals such as MFS: Modern Fiction Studies, Genre and ESQ: A Journal of the American Renaissance. Eric’s first book, Composing Cultures: Modernism, American Literary Studies and the Problem of Culture was published in 2013.

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