Staff Picks

"In the past two decades, artists, and writers have increasingly adopted the idea that science fiction can be understood as a lens through which to search for fragments of truth emerging from the past or the future, and the proliferation of science fiction in contemporary art practice and discourse reflects an increased understanding of how this narrative field continues to grow in relevance. Split into four distinct approaches, "estrangement," "futures," "posthumanism," and "ecologies," this unique collection gathers key examples of the influence of science fiction in recent cultural development: from the integration and acceleration of technological change, to global urbanization and concepts of futurity; from the boundaries of social structures and non-human life, to the threatening self-evidence of climate change. This book is the first major anthology to focus on relationships between science fiction and contemporary art, and is an essential read for all those exploring this vital genre. Artists surveyed include Denenge Akpem, Laylah Ali, Allora & Calzadilla, Pawel Althamer, Carol Bove, Lee Bul, Mark Dion, Jimmie Durham, Ellen Gallagher, Robert Gober, Eduardo Kac, Mikhail Karikis, Patrick Keiller, Karen Kilimnik, Jeff Koons, Moon Kyungwon and Jeon Joonho, Lawrence Lek, Paul McCarthy, Mariko Mori, David Musgrave, Otolith Group, Eduardo Paolozzi, Kiki Smith, Sun Ra, Suzanne Treister, Jeff Wall. Writers include Peio Aguirre, Margaret Atwood, J.G. Ballard, Tiffany E. Barber, Jean Baudrillard, Franco 'Bifo' Beradi, Rosie Braidotti, Rachel Carson, Jeffrey Deitch, Donna Haraway, Cathy Lane, Amna Malik, Tom McCarthy, Alondra Nelson, Gwyneth Shanks, Jan Tumlir, Xin Wang, Gilda Williams"--Publisher's description

The world today seems to be slipping into a science fiction future. We have phones that speak to us, cars that drive themselves, and connected devices that communicate with each other in languages we don't understand. Depending the news of the day, we inhabit either a technological utopia or Brave New World nightmare. This volume in the MIT Press Essential Knowledge surveys the uses of science fiction. It focuses on what is at the core of all definitions of science fiction: a vision of the world made otherwise and what possibilities might flow from such otherness.--Publisher's description

Over the last decade, author and activist Astra Taylor has helped shift the national conversation on topics including technology, inequality, indebtedness, and democracy. The essays collected here reveal the range and depth of her thinking, with Taylor tackling the rising popularity of socialism, the problem of automation, the politics of listening, the possibility of rights for the natural and non-human world, the future of the university, the temporal challenge of climate catastrophe, and more. Addressing some of the most pressing social problems of our day, Taylor invites us to imagine how things could be different while never losing sight of the strategic question of how change actually happens. Curious and searching, these historically informed and hopeful essays are as engaging as they are challenging and as urgent as they are timeless. Taylor 's unique philosophical style has a political edge that speaks directly to the growing conviction that a radical transformation of our economy and society is required.--Publisher's description

Blackspace: On the Poetics of an Afrofuture is the culmination of six years of multidisciplinary research by trans poet and curator Anaïs Duplan about the aesthetic strategies used by experimental artists of color since the 1960s to pursue liberatory possibility. Through a series of lyric essays, interviews with contemporary artists and writers of color, and ekphrastic poetry, Duplan deconstructs how creative people frame their relationships to the word, “liberation.” With a focus on creatives who use digital media and language-as-technology—luminaries like Actress, Juliana Huxtable, Lawrence Andrews, Tony Cokes, Sondra Perry, and Nathaniel Mackey—Duplan offers three lenses for thinking about liberation: the personal, the social, and the existential. Arguing that true freedom is impossible without considering all three, the book culminates with a personal essay meditating on the author’s own journey of gender transition while writing the book.--Publisher's description

Connecting the dots between science fiction, music, mythology and film, this book details the development of the ideas fueling what Sun Ra called "the Alter destiny." Science fiction, long the domain of "old white men," is increasingly becoming more and more multicultural--and the pioneers of this movement, including Samuel R. Delany and Octavia Butler--are examined here. Chapters on music (Sun Ra himself, of course, but also George Clinton and other jazz musicians), on film (including the Matrix trilogy) and an analysis of the ways mythology, including the famous case of the Dogons, influenced these art forms follow. Connections with the wider realm of popular culture are proposed, and the process of cross-fertilization that had had such an influence on the development of the arts in this century is elucidated.--Publisher's description

The Posthuman Glossary is a volume providing an outline of the critical terms of posthumanity in present-day artistic and intellectual work. It builds on the broad thematic topics of Anthropocene/Capitalocene, eco-sophies, digital activism, algorithmic cultures and security and the inhuman. It outlines potential artistic, intellectual, and activist itineraries of working through the complex reality of the 'posthuman condition', and creates an understanding of the altered meanings of art vis-à-vis critical present-day developments. It bridges missing links across disciplines, terminologies, constituencies and critical communities.--Publisher's description

"In this personal, moving essay, environmental activist and hip-hop artist Xiuhtezcatl Martinez uses his art and his activism to show that climate change is a human issue that can't be ignored"--Publisher's description

The future is like an unwritten book. It is not something we see in a crystal ball, or can only hope to predict, like the weather. In this volume of the MIT Press's Essential Knowledge series, Nick Montfort argues that the future is something to be made, not predicted. Montfort offers what he considers essential knowledge about the future, as seen in the work of writers, artists, inventors, and designers (mainly in Western culture) who developed and described the core components of the futures they envisioned. Montfort's approach is not that of futurology or scenario planning; instead, he reports on the work of making the future—the thinkers who devoted themselves to writing pages in the unwritten book. Douglas Engelbart, Alan Kay, and Ted Nelson didn't predict the future of computing, for instance. They were three of the people who made it.--Publisher's description

Matters of Care contests the view that care is something only humans do, and argues for extending to non-humans the consideration of agencies and communities that make the living web of care by considering how care circulates in the natural world. The first of the book’s two parts, “Knowledge Politics,” defines the motivations for expanding the ethico-political meanings of care, focusing on discussions in science and technology that engage with sociotechnical assemblages and objects as lively, politically charged “things.” The second part, “Speculative Ethics in Antiecological Times,” considers everyday ecologies of sustaining and perpetuating life for their potential to transform our entrenched relations to natural worlds as “resources.”

"What can we hope for at the end of the world? What can we trust in when community has broken our hearts? What would it mean to pursue justice without violence? How can we love in the absence of faith? In a heartbreaking yet hopeful collection of personal essays and prose poems, blending the confessional, political, and literary, acclaimed poet and essayist Kai Cheng Thom dives deep into the questions that haunt social movements today. With the author's characteristic eloquence and honesty, I Hope We Choose Love proposes heartfelt solutions on the topics of violence, complicity, family, vengeance, and forgiveness. Taking its cues from contemporary thought leaders in the transformative justice movement such as adrienne maree brown and Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, this provocative book is a call for nuance in a time of political polarization, for healing in a time of justice, and for love in an apocalypse."-- Provided by publisher.

"Black Futures is a collection of work--art, photos, essays, memes, dialogues, recipes, tweets, poetry, and more--that tells the story of the radical, imaginative, bold, and beautiful world that black artists, high and low, are producing today. The book presents a succession of brilliant and provocative pieces--from both emerging and renowned creators of all kinds--that generates an entrancing rhythm: Readers will go from conversations with hackers and street artists to memes and Instagram posts, from powerful prose to dazzling paintings and insightful infographics. A generational document that captures this fast-moving generation in its own dynamic and exspansive language. While shaped in the tradition of other generational statements, from The New Negro to Black Fire to Toni Morrison's landmark The Black Book, Black Futures does not have a retrospective air. It showcases the present, but points to the future. We live at a time when black culture--whether it's created by Ava DuVernay or Donald Glover, Kendrick Lamar or Cardi B, meme-makers or YouTubers--is opening our imaginations and offering new paths forward, a multi-voiced, utopian alternative to a world of walls and white nationalism. Black Futures captures this expansive vision and energy and makes it available to any reader, of any color, who wants to explore this exciting cultural moment and see the next one coming"--Publisher's description

"When Lilith lyapo wakes from a centuries-long sleep, she finds herself aboard the vast spaceship of the Oankali. She discovers that the Oankali'a seemingly benevolent alien race'intervened in the fate of the humanity hundreds of years ago, saving everyone who survived a nuclear war from a dying, ruined Earth and then putting them into a deep sleep. After learning all they could about Earth and its beings, the Oankali healed the planet, cured cancer, increased human strength, and they now want Lilith to lead her people back to Earth, but salvation comes at a price."--Publisher's description

"In a future world ravaged by global warming, people have lost the ability to dream, and the dreamlessness has led to widespread madness. The only people still able to dream are North America's indigenous population - and it is their marrow that holds the cure for the rest of the world. But getting the marrow - and dreams - means death for the unwilling donors. Driven to flight, a 15-year-old and his companions struggle for survival, attempt to reunite with loved ones, and take refuge from the "recruiters" who seek them out to bring them to the marrow-stealing 'factories.'"--Publisher's description

The Liminal Chrysalis: Imagining Reproduction and Parenting Futures Beyond the Binary is an edited collection that works to identify and deconstruct many of the countless binaries that operate within the realms of parenting and reproduction. Weaving poetry, speculative fiction, and autobiography, with interviews, critical analysis and research, the authors take as their starting place that there is magical potential and possibility in the ambiguous, disorienting spaces of the in-between and the beyond. The collection challenges the constructedness of binaries connected to sex, gender, sexuality, and parenting roles, as well as the cis-, hetero-, repro-, trans- and amatonormativities which pervasively circulate and inform how we think about parenting and reproductive life. The collection amplifies the voices of non-binary authors among others, and tells stories of menstruation, pregnancy, abortion, assisted reproductive technologies, fertility preservation, parenthood, and activism in the face of violent binaries and reproductive injustices.--Publisher's description

"Proceeding from the sense that the dominate western languages do not have the words we need to describe our environmental crisis or propose to it, this book is a collaborative volume of short, accessible chapters that propose ecologically productive terms - drawn from other languages, from speculative fiction, and from activist subcultures - as a means of envisioning and inspiring responses and alternatives to fossil-fueled neoliberal capitalism"--Publisher's description

"After a failed experiment to stop global warming, a post-apocalyptic ice age kills off all life on the planet except for the inhabitants of the Snowpiercer, a train that travels around the globe and is powered by a sacred perpetual-motion engine. A class system evolves aboard the train, fiercely dividing its population, but the lower-class passengers in one of the last cars stage an uprising, moving car by car up to the front of the train, where the oppressive rich and powerful ride."

"A black alien crash lands in New York Harbor and winds up in Harlem where he is accepted by the locals who work to shield him from the alien bounty hunters."

Sun Ra, space-age prophet, lands his spaceship, having been presumed lost in space for a few years. Like Ra himself, Space is the Place is one of a kind, a mythopoetic manifesto made by people who believed in Ra's mystical message as much as they dug the raw splendor of his Afro-psychedelica.

"Explores the relationships between Pan-African culture, science fiction, space exploration, and computer technology. Examines science fiction elements in literature and music as metaphors for the Pan-African experience of forced displacement and cultural alienation."

Kathy, Ruth, and Tommy are best friends who grow up together at an English boarding school with a chilling secret. When they learn the shocking truth that they are genetically engineered clones raised to be organ donors, they embrace their fleeting chance to live and love.

"After hundreds of lonely years, a waste management robot finds a new purpose in life. With only a cockroach for a friend, he finds true love in another robot sent on a mission to Earth to see if it is safe for human life."

Caleb, a 24-year-old coder at the world's largest Internet company, wins a competition to spend a week at a retreat belonging to the company's reclusive CEO, Nathan. But when Caleb arrives he finds that he will have to participate in a fascinating experiment with the world's first true artificial intelligence, housed in the body of a beautiful robot woman, Ava. Truths, emotions, and motives are blurred as the relationship between Caleb, Ava, and Nathan intensifies.

In Gattaca, only the strong succeed and the strong are genetically pre-selected at birth. When one man dares to defy the system, he gets caught in a web of lies, corruption, and murder.

"Childhood friends Tetsuo and Kaneda's motorcycle gang encounters a military operation to retrieve an escaped experimental subject. The military captures Tetsuo and conducts experiments on him that unleash his latent psychic ability, but when these new powers rage out of control, Tetsuo lashes out at the world that has oppressed him."--Container.

An alien being comes to Earth to colonize its water riches but instead becomes head of a large corporation and is gradually destroyed by the pleasures, the technology, and the richness of life on earth.