Overview

An exploration of contemporary speculative fiction’s power to intervene in social, political, and environmental crises, this book demonstrates how the genre provides resources against demagogic falsehoods, conspiratorial fantasies, and the denial of scientific and historical evidence. In the face of conspiracy theories, climate change denial, and cultural warfare over gender, race, and history, speculative fiction’s willing suspension of belief, as well as disbelief, enables us to sidestep the barriers to dialogue raised by dogmatism and exit the narrow confines of partisan debate. It offers imaginative possibilities that can help readers “escape” from both right-wing demagoguery and status quo complacency. While elaborating this appraisal of speculative fiction in readings of recent work by Amal El Mohtar and Max Gladstone, N. K. Jemisin, Minsoo Kang, Ann Leckie, Arkady Martine, China Miéville, Rivers Solomon, and Ben H. Winters, John Rieder’s Truth, Lies, and Speculative Fiction urges scholars and teachers to employ speculative fiction’s power in secondary and higher education.

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9781350551527

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Reviews

In the era of social media, manufactured outrage, ‘fake news’ and ‘alternative truths', this book is a major intervention in contemporary debates about the role of science fiction as a genre with specific bottom-up political potentials. Obviously relevant in the current US context, Rieder’s astute analysis clearly resonates elsewhere. * Dr. Mark Bould, Professor of Film and Literature, UWE *

Author Information

John Rieder is Emeritus Professor of English at the University of Hawai‘i at Manoa, USA. He is author of Colonialism and the Emergence of Science Fiction (2008), Science Fiction and the Mass Cultural Genre System (2017), Speculative Epistemologies (2021), and many other publications. He received the Science Fiction Research Association’s Lifetime Achievement Award in 2019.

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