German-language Science Fiction’s Natural Histories

German Studies Association, Louisville, KY September 22-25, 2011

Science fiction, because of its innate affinity to questions of political,
historical, sociotechnical, and biological alterity, would seem to be a fertile
field for considering the relationship between nature and history, as literary
categories, social discourses, and sites of political struggle. Indeed, from its
arguable generic inception in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818) to the 2010
corecipient of the Hugo award, Paolo Bacigalupi’s The Windup Girl, science
fiction has grappled with the shifting implications of this relationship like few
other genres. In German science fiction, this tendency is likewise present,
from Kurd Laßwitz’s imaginative use of Darwin, to Döblin’s epic natural history
of the future, Berge Meere und Giganten (1924), to the Steinmüllers’ dynamic,
terraforming utopia in Andymon (1982), coming at the tail end of GDR SF’s
rich tradition.

Much English-language scholarly work on science fiction in recent decades,
drawing on Marxian insights of German critical theory, has underscored the
critical, utopian aspects of the genre. Science fiction is characterized in this
view as a genre or mode of ‘cognitive estrangement,’ centering on the
presence of a Blochian novum (Suvin); rather than preparing the reader for
the shocks of a coming modernity, it functions to estrange the present,
“transforming our own present into the determinate past of something yet to
come” (Jameson); indeed like critical theory itself, science fiction “insists upon
historical mutability, material reducibility, and utopian possibility” (Freedman).
On this view, science fiction is marked by an affiliation to the critical, Marxist
gesture of historicization – even nature, in its narrative emplotment as a
subject of interrogation, is historicized.

Yet the inverse tendency – to naturalize history – seems present in equal
measure. Whether because of the interplay between scientific and humanist
discourses, the superlative integration of science and technology into its
characters and narrative modes, or its sweeping diachrony, science fiction
offers countless examples of historical temporalities reabsorbed into
biological, geological, or cosmic time.

In this panel we will consider what is to be won by measuring nature and
history against one another in the context of science fiction. We invite
submissions on science fiction, broadly conceived and from all epochs of
German literature, that address the topic.

Possible topics include but are not limited to:

•       SF and materialism – dialectical, historical, or otherwise
•       biopower, biopolitics, and biotech
•       world-creation and narrative theory
•       historicization of nature/naturalization of history
•       historical and natural temporalities
•       East German science fiction, GDR cultural policy, socialist realism, and utopia
•       futuristic fantasies, fascist or otherwise
•       SF’s natural histories
•       SF and critical theory
•       Weimar-era SF, Neue Sachlichkeit, constructivism, and functionalism
•       catastrophes, disasters, eschatologies, and other ends of history
•       Neuanfang, Stunde Null, and historical rupture
•       utopias: negative, critical, ambiguous, or otherwise
•       machines, bodies, technology, and the organic
•       historical and biological others
•       realms of necessity, realms of freedom
•       the Zukunftsroman and the historische Roman
•       SF subjectivities, agency, and collectivity
•       SF as a transnational meditation on history
•       SF and race

Please send a 250-300 word abstract by February 1 to panel organizers Paul
Buchholz and Carl Gelderloos at [log in to unmask]

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