1 Fredric Jameson, Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions (Verso Books, 2007), 255. 2 Benjamin Robertson, “‘Some Matching Strangeness’: Biology, Politics, and the Embrace of History in Octavia Butler’s ‘Kindred,’” Science Fiction Studies 37, no. 3 (2010): 362–81. 3 Terry Smith, “From Multiple Modernisms to Global Contemporaneity: Where, When, How, Why and in Whose Interest?,” Multiple Modernisms (symposium), November 2, 2017. Louisiana Research, Louisiana Museum of Art, Copenhagen, video recording, https://vimeo.com/248311272. Rather than supporting evidence towards a relativist means of thinking, SF is a powerful framing device that allows greater public access to various methods of living that have emerged over time across different modernities, and continues to ensure futures for those who can envision it. Prolific writers in this space such as Octavia Butler or Ursula K. LeGuinn for example, —the latter a strong influence on Burns’ project—have historically used SF as political parable and allegory. This practice bridges real-world issues such as racism or oppressive gender binaries with radical ways of re-imagining freer and fairer means of existence that have in turn been taken up by their readers to enact real political change. 2 In this way, SF as a genre is prepositional to the world we live in today. In English grammar, a preposition expresses a spatial or temporal relation to another word that denotes a semantic role—to be prepositional then is to be in an active community with sign systems. a vocabulary of representation. Within the scientific method, there is always a remainder of knowledge—a free radical of possibility—which emerges. This tenant is central to the strategies used by science fiction writers throughout history, where allegory challenges notions of self and other through experimenting with our own realities. Emerging from this set of coordinates, Burns’ work gives matter to unseen/unforeseen spaces which can expand our collective language around what determines a world. Central to the genre of SF is its use of expanded sites of knowledge pro- duction—prologues, epilogues, maps, languages, new genders, new species, new labor systems, and new existential problems—to construct a believable and inhabitable space for the reader. Theorist and critic Fredric Jameson has written in Archeologies for the Future that the “supreme function” of SF is its ability to conjure “a shocked renewal of our vision such that once again, and as though for the first time, we are able to perceive their historicity and their arbitrariness, their profound dependency on the accidents of man’s historical adventure.” 1 His emphasis on how SF puts time and knowledge into new perspectives, recognizes a way to think around the signs which construct our current systems of being and becoming. By de-centering hegemonic logics that are informed and shaped by self-replicating systems of crisis, the argument is that one could reimagine both history and authority itself, allowing some worlds to end while others continue into new realms of possibility.
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