SF as the "Queering of Realism"

If, as I write in the introduction, SF can be read as the queering of realism, then it is as the dominant culture’s death drive that it does so: SF provides the speculative challenge to our primary definitions of reality, the first step necessary in the creation of fiction as such, even as its movement away from reality is a move away from the understandable, an anti-telos that denies the finality of meaning altogether. If SF is the limit case of reality, the limit case of SF is the truly alien, that which exists beyond the range of the conceivable: SF figures the death of culture. If, as Sidonie Smith points out, certain dominant definitions of the human follow hierarchical othering structures, then the ecstasy of the SF novum—Aminadab’s laughter, that fantastic unreality—lies precisely in its ability to deny altogether the need for the static definition of mundane humanity, of the citizens of utopia and their directed futurity. In other words, we must deny the terror of that mundane humanity which reproduces the present as the future and embrace instead the ecstasy of undirected possibility that the semiotic chaos of SF offers. If to be human is to be consistently mundane, then we must embark on the robot’s perpetual, fantastic mission to kill all humans.

Jason Haslam, Gender, Race, and American Science Fiction: Reflections on Fantastic Identities (2015)

• critical theory
• science fiction