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Hay una confusión específica que está en el centro de todo esto y que vale la pena nombrar con precisión: la confusión entre ver el mecanismo y estar fuera del mecanismo. Son dos cosas completamente distintas. Puedes entender perfectamente cómo funciona una trampa y seguir dentro. Puedes describir con exactitud los…
A thread asking dungeon-masters how “fantasy racism” – the antipathy of dwarves and orcs for example – affects the design and play of campaigns received a range of answers. One poster said “I have a pretty accepting world. I’m a bit more flexible with alignments than the books suggest … there aren’t really any major…
Jeffrey Jerome Cohen argues that: “any kind of alterity can be inscribed across (constructed through) the monstrous body, but for the most part monstrous difference tends to be cultural, political, racial, economic, sexual.”3 Fear of racial difference has been embodied through monsters for centuries, and the idea of…
Inconsistencies in any fictional world can be jarring to audiences and detract from the narrative; “lacking consistency, a world may begin to appear sloppily constructed, or even random and disconnected.”58 Since Secondary Worlds are increasingly likely to be inconsistent as they grow in size and scope, analogies to…
When the player selects one of the four “Culture” options, an explanatory text box pops up to provide information about it. That information links directly to race, for example: “the Khitani are slender with sharp features and parchment-yellow skin,” and “Cimmerians are a northern race of barbarians, fair skinned and…
The impact of Dungeons and Dragons (D&D) and its many transmedia products, while fairly infrequently discussed by historians of fiction in Fantasy, ought not to go unremarked. Even if the trickle-down influence of the game is not considered, its most popular realms were shared worlds in which large numbers of novels…
Conan is a White American hero: self-sufficient and independent, strong, honest, and moral, abiding by his own code of honour. His “dual identity of being a savage, but being white,”72 makes him naturally suited to lead the softer, more decadent and corrupted peoples of the south; he becomes, among other things, king…
Tolkien’s explanations of the differences between Good and Evil humanity – that the former descended from those who had greatest contactand affinity with the Elves in ancient times – does not obviously relate to pseudo-scientific explanations of racial difference; it smacks more of religious constructs of a “chosen…
The influence of philological Anglo-Saxonism on Tolkien is clearly visible in his depiction of the Riders of Rohan who “resemble the ancient English down to minute detail.”42 Tolkien had access to the culture of the Anglo-Saxons through his professional work, and drew on their literature extensively. Yet that access…
Modern concepts of race were formulated as a “widely shared theory of biologically determined, physical, intellectual and moral differences between human groups.”35 Hannah Augstein identifies three key elements in nineteenth century race-thinking: that humanity can be divided into races “whose characteristics are…
Scholarly engagements with the Fantasy genre tend to come largely from literary perspectives and to focus on genre as a body of texts, usually written. Definitions, as a result, are generally concerned with how to delineate its boundaries – which texts are in and which are out? Brian Attebery’s delineation of…
Fantasy is a useful sub-set through which to explore popular culture not only because of its prominent position at the present historical moment,but because its inherently non-mimetic nature creates a space which is at least nominally not “the real world” and is therefore safer for cultural work around fraught issues…
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…
Doro is an ideal consumer who is both part of a “race,” “nation,” or “empire” (those terms being as confused and intertwined for Doro as they were for Burroughs) and its predator. This depiction of Doro highlights the ways in which a hyper-extended consumerism and an exceptionalist definition of nation both…
Herbert’s critique of this seemingly countercultural utopia is precisely aimed at its conservatism. In necessarily rendering life static, the utopian vision must deny the instability of signification and that permits for change and development itself. In making this argument, I am aware that I am (or Herbert is)…
o, directly opposing Rebekah Simpkins’ assertion that “By removing the control, Neo sets the prisoners free,” the first film ends with those controls still in place.45 At the end of The Matrix, after all, Neo does not awaken everyone to “the real,” but instead exploits the continued functioning of the Matrix, leaving…
Antiblack racism continues not despite, but because of, the disappearance of blacks; this is only a paradox if the construction of blackness is seen as being essentially related to skin colour as opposed to economics. To bolster this position, Matthew emphasises the discourse of “blood purity”—as discussed in the…
In the theoretical and critical literature of whiteness studies, one of the more often discussed ways in which the social efficacy of the category of whiteness has been maintained in the face of its various “leaks” is, ironically, through its erasure as a definable racial category, as was briefly mentioned in the…
This general paradigm is offered as a theoretical ground for the specific focus and readings of the rest of this book, which analyses in detail the issues of gender, race, and their representation in American SF. For, while the “cognitive” element of SF may not hold in all or even most cases, still SF, as a specular…
Delany—in his equally famous and oft-cited definition of science fiction—argues that science fiction is characterised by an extension of semiotic possibilities in language: that is, he argues that words can simply mean more in science fiction than they can in realist fiction. Delany sees this as a function of the…