Jaak Tomberg, an associate professor of Estonian literature and the conference's main organizer, named the conference's theme "Transitions" – thematic, narrative, historical, and philosophical transitions that drive science fiction. So how does science fiction imagine these transitions today? ERR's science portal set up a roundtable with three science fiction scholars.

Andres Reimann: The term "possible futures" brings to mind 18th-century political thought. For many writers of this period projection of possible futures was central, but more importantly, they were interested in the transition mechanisms – how to get from one reality to another. However, today there is a widespread sentiment among people working in political theory that, while they are still quite good at imagining possible futures, they are actually pretty bad at imagining the ways of getting there. Does science fiction share this same concern?

Mark Bould: Indeed, many, including William Gibson, Italian philosopher Franco Berardi, and American futurologist Bruce Tonn, have argued that we have stopped imagining the future. No one talks about the 22nd century today, whereas if you look at the 20th century, everyone is banging on about what the 21st century is going to be like. 

But that isn't part of the popular discourse today. Tonn's research work on the topic, which is just interviews with regular folks, revealed that many could imagine maybe 10, 20 years into a personal future, but after that it went dark. So I think we are living in such an interregnum, or a transition period, where we can't see a future at all, and that's part of the contemporary landscape in terms of thinking about transitions.

There is a trend in science fiction – one obvious name would be Kim Stanley Robinson – to think about specific mechanisms for transforming what we have into a more human and liveable world, even if not quite achieving the revolutionary transformations that we might have hoped for.

So we need to come up with strategies for bridging the present moment with the future. I agree with some of the points Cory Doctorow has been making this week as well: We are not going to just switch from this moment in time to perfection, as such a transition has historically been imagined.

When talking about utopian fiction, there's often a mention of the trench around King Utopus' Island as a way of representing the difficulty. So science fiction by some authors is starting to wrestle with modes of transition. But what they tend not to have is a grand utopian vision; a lot of it is merely about survival, so making things less bad rather than making things good. 

Amy Cutler: Yes, this may be a somewhat literal interpretation of your question about how we reach the future, but one of the things I'm interested in is real-life time machines. We already have a few real-life time machines, including the animal, which essentially functions as a biological time machine. It is a bridge between the past and the future, particularly in our current era where life and the cyber are constantly reshaping each other.

Another kind of time machine is film, or cinema. And a lot of my work is about the shared discourses and the configurations of life between cinematic technologies and genetic technologies. Recently, I've been exploring the concept of de-extinction, which is also what drew me to this conference – the weird idea by which an animal can be its own descendant, sort of its own heir, but also its own harbinger, like the usher of the future. 

For example, consider the woolly mammoth, an impossible future creature that we are actively creating, despite its impossibility. So it's a kind of animal that, you know, what you have to do – you require living tissue, you require information, you require some sort of computation or interface. It's hard to say where exactly in those three positions the animal is, but you put these together and what you've got is sort of a ghost, sort of a hoax, and yet it's somehow shaping the species of the future. So, in terms of how we get to the future, something that I'm interested in are these time machine experiments that we're already living with.

David Higgins: I think that science fiction writers and theorists understand that science fiction isn't only about envisioning futures. Our present is the pathway to the future, and the way that we think about the future is the way that we think about the present that we're in.

So a common misconception is that science fiction primarily focuses on imagining possible futures. But some of the most classic scholarship in science fiction criticism has been about, you know, what Ursula K. Le Guin says: that science fiction isn't really about predicting the future, it's about causing us to look at the present differently. 

I think that this is the case, and science fiction has significantly influenced how people view the present with a focus on the future. For instance, the work of Ann Leckie, the person I was presenting on at this conference, and the work of other feminist and transgender science fiction writers and scholars, offer tangible possibilities for how things could be different.

Leckie's most recent book, "Translation State," is a delightful exploration of various ways we can interact with pronouns and gender identity, and also all forms of identity. It encompasses various aspects such as race, species, ethnicity, gender and sexuality. And part of what's cool about it is that, as the reader, you're in there, living out a different kind of experience from the inside. And that opens up for many people the possibility of, oh, I've just been living my life this way, but now I'm getting this window into how I might live or feel differently.

The tricky part of this is that it's not solely progressive individuals who use science fiction to envision alternative worlds. A lot of my work is really on how extremists, far-right reactionary groups, use science fiction in their self-identification and in the way they imagine the world could look differently tomorrow. So there is a troubling trend of reactionary futurism, which is common not only in the U.S. context but also globally.

So I don't know; that's a great and complicated question, very tricky. I think that science fiction plays a crucial role in re-imagining the present and creating diverse futures in today's world. That's what I'm trying to show.

This next question is on the uses of science fiction and the role it can and should play in today's world. Most people still perceive science fiction as a form of entertainment and that often diminishes its credibility. At the same time, the power with which science fiction captivates the reader is probably stronger than that of most other literary forms. Should science fiction have the ambition to use its potential to change the world? Again, when I look at 20th century political-literary theory, much of it addresses people's political motivation. It aims to shape the reader's psychology. Should science fiction have this ambition, too?

Amy Cutler: I won't speak to literary science fiction, but I will mention a specific type of science fiction that I believe deserves special attention. And particularly because it's not recognized as science fiction at all.

So one source that I work with quite a lot is the nature documentary, which is science driven by fiction, but also fiction driven by science, in the sense that cinema is like a laboratory tool for studying life. It's called a vitascope or a bioscope; it's a kind of life science, but also a sort of life writing. It's driven by traditions of fiction, travel literature, and life writing, but it's also documentary science and experimental science at the same time. 

The borders between conventional science fiction and nature documentaries are already crossing, like in "The Life of Insects," for instance, an insect nature documentary. So that genre absolutely has a responsibility to shape the world differently, because it's maybe one of the strongest future-making devices we have in contemporary media space. It's pretty much one of the only ones where you can broadcast something, and then you can look at statistics on how people are behaving, and there is an immediate change, which is incredible.

However, the reason it fascinates me as a form of science fiction is also due to the authorial relationships involved. So, when you refer to something as a nature documentary, you're not necessarily referring to the subject matter and asserting that it's about nature, which is why it qualifies as such. You are identifying a distinct ownership pattern exclusive to this genre, which monopolises it.

The nature documentary usually consists of a compilation of stock footage. It's a way of controlling a monologue of nature or a kind of authoritarian politics of nature. So it's basically a tyrannical formula that we're stamping onto the future all the time. And it's the kind of story we have the most chronic low-dose exposure to the whole time. 

There is a particular word that each time I say it, I feel silly because it sounds silly. However, that word is the stock-footage-ication of the world, given that we live in an age where nature documentaries predominate. So, we're watching footage about a world that in many cases is long dead, or a species that's long dead, and yet it's rerunnable, rerunnable, rerunnable image distribution.

So this kind of ambient disaster is really interesting to me, and that's exactly... It's not even... We're not sitting around being like, oh, I'm so literary, I'm going to write a new kind of nature documentary, but it's more that we need to hack the ones that are there - to hack the strongest monopolies for storytelling. So that's why my focus is on the nature documentary, rather than maybe more obviously speculative or literary forms of science fiction at the moment. 

David Higgins: I suppose I could put it this way: I'm sure there are still people who think that science fiction is just really for entertainment, but in the U.S. context, I think it's pretty clear to everyone at this point that speculative fiction, especially popular speculative fiction, is shaping our social realities in powerful ways. I mean, this is why Ron DeSantis is going after Disney so hard, right? 

Our media landscape has undergone a significant transformation since my childhood, when there were only a few networks. People were able to see what was available on those networks, and they would discuss these topics at work or in other social settings. Because of the internet and the rapid expansion of our media landscape, there is no longer a traditional media commons as there once was. If there is something that's kind of like a media common these days, it's Marvel movies, Star Wars, and science fiction. These fandoms are extremely active, and the majority of them are quite political. I don't know if that is true; I don't have any data, but I believe that the majority of science fiction fans, at least in the U.S., have strong political views as well.

I was reminded of Gabriel Burrow's presentation on Yanis Varoufakis' book, "Another Now," which is essentially a science fiction novel written by a former finance minister, focusing on the Occupy movement and global financial speculation protests. I think that, yes, science fiction should aspire to change the world, and I think that most science fiction creators are thinking in those ways and often in very sophisticated ways, as with the examples that you have brought up, and I think that a lot of fans are too, but also people with power in the world.

I mean, look at all the discourse around artificial intelligence, and it doesn't take very long to find out that the people who are creating it are inspired by or have their worldviews shaped by science fiction and are writing science fiction novels about how they imagine these things are going to go. We all know about Elon Musk and his rockets, right? It is shaping our world in multiple, powerful ways.

Mark Bould: I believe Amy's statement about hacking the dominant science fiction is very important. The dominant [unrecognised] science fiction that I see everywhere is speculative finance. Since the 1980s, the financialization of the global economy has been a significant manifestation of both science fiction and delusional fantasy. I think this is what we have to challenge, this is what we have to tackle. Many works of science fiction already address these issues, contemplate these processes and explore alternative approaches to the economy and world organisation.

But there is this tremendous pool of potential there. The editors of "Octavia's Brood," [a collection of speculative fiction] talk about science fiction as social activism because all social activism is also a work of science fiction. Because you're imagining a different outcome, a different possible outcome. And trying to precisely build those transitional steps to get from here to there while on the other side of the time war. You also have financial interests, and so on, trying to destroy that possible future. So I think science fiction has tremendous potential. It doesn't just lie in the texts, it's in the relationships between texts and readers. 

You cannot predict what an audience will do with a text. We saw that with something as dreadful as Avatar. It was able to draw attention to activism around trying to save the Amazon and Palestinian struggles purely by people adopting the look of the Navi [a fictional indigenous species]. So this profoundly problematic colonial narrative was something that could be taken as a resource seized upon, hacked, transformed, and laboured to try and create a better future. 

African and Asian authors have gained popularity over the last decade. Their books entail differences in worldviews and perspectives that are somewhat similar in scope to the division between Western and Soviet science fiction during the Cold War. What does this tell us about our worldviews? Can we say that one is right or good? For example, climate dystopias seem to be much closer to the hearts of Africans, while we see communal dystopias in so many works from China.

David Higgins: Indeed, there has been a significant surge in the number of African and Asian science fiction authors, alongside those from the Caribbean, Middle East, and beyond. 

I see in this development a collective acknowledgment of the enduring connection between science fiction and colonial fantasy since their inception. This is evident in the works of John Rieder and many others. Science fiction, like Frankenstein, has grappled with what technology means and how the effects of the industrial revolution will change us.

But I also think that science fiction emerges as a genre from a lot of nonsense imperial adventure fantasies, American westerns, westerns in space, and colonial adventure narratives in space. I would say that  since the 1960s at least, there has been a real coming to awareness within science fiction all around the world of that kind of colonial fantasy that has often underpinned science fiction imaginings. In my opinion, the diverse voices we hear in science fiction today, though not all, are primarily responding to criticism. They are leveraging the power of science fiction to speak to their own colonialist imagination.

Whether it's eco-colonialism, literal nation-state colonisation, settler colonialism, or the extractive fantasies of speculative finance, I find it intriguing how science fiction, deeply intertwined with colonial and imperial imaginaries, has evolved into a genre that fundamentally critiques imperialist fantasy in nearly all its manifestations.

I don't think there is a single correct trend in science fiction; I see a variety of approaches taken by science fiction writers from many diverse backgrounds, each attempting to explain how Western modernity, since the Enlightenment, has distorted their world. Here are some responses to this: either closely examine the state of chaos in the world, or explore alternative ways of thinking, being, and dreaming from non-Western perspectives. And that's truly rich and wonderful.

Amy Cutler: I don't have much to add, but I was just reflecting on the technology behind storytelling. Clearly, this issue has always been the case, but in recent years, with the increasing use of VR for storytelling, I believe we are witnessing a further resurgence of this phenomenon. We've been discussing the pathological entrepreneurialism of certain sci-fi visions of the future, but this type of technocratic storytelling is often revisiting the romantic colonial sublime – it's an aesthetic of "I put on my VR headset and I'm a solo white avatar in a pretty foggy landscape."

And this is something that literary criticism has been dealing with for a long time, but oh, probably this is more your field than mine in the sense that it's therefore an unconscious element, which is what it would be? It would be something like Mount Tambora, the volcano, as well as the idea of the year without summer; that's what's shaped this particular aesthetic of climate anxiety, which now returns in force in new media but is under-analysed. This kind of neo-colonial romantic revivalism of lands and technologies of "discovery", I think, is pushing this debate as well at the moment, even as we seek new kinds of diversification. 

Mark Bould: I think one way to think about these kinds of issues comes from precisely that question of thinking about science fiction's relationship to the future. The traditional model of science fiction, in which authors analyse current trends or tendencies and project them into the future, suggests what if the present trajectory persists, it could result in a humorous satirical scenario or a dystopian scenario. However, we can approach this extrapolation model in a distinct manner.

I think Fredric Jameson was the first to do this in an essay, from 1975, on Ursula Le Guin's "Left Hand of Darkness," where he examines it at the sentence level in the book's opening chapter. The narrative world has a massive castle-like building, and it has barge-sized road vehicles on caterpillar tracks going down the street. What you see there is what the world actually looks like – this kind of jumble of time periods all existing at once. So in Raymond Williams terms, we'd be talking about the current moment always consisting of the dominant, the residual, and the emergent. 

Paul Ricoeur does the same with time; the present moment always contains the past and the future. I think what science fiction tends to do is rearrange those elements a little bit. But it's one of the points that Jameson doesn't make there, and I assume it's lurking in the background, but he never says it outright. He's basically talking about the efficacy of science fiction in discussing combined and uneven development.

So when we talk about science fiction coming from Africa, Asia, or whatever, there are Indigenous traditions of storytelling that encounter colonialism at some point, and from that moment on, they're interacting in some ways with a dominant culture that has imposed itself upon them. So we're not engaging with some pure notion of African science fiction, where what we're talking about is a particular spatial and temporal nexus within a global process producing local oddities. 

What existed prior to capitalism? Indeed, it became part of the new paradigm that took its place. What we're seeing from many writers, particularly African and Chinese writers with whom I'm more familiar, is a combination of uneven development from a perspective significantly less privileged than our own. And I think that's where a lot of the value and fascination with this work come from. It's not a sense of engaging with an exotic other, nor is it an expression of orientalist fantasy.

There's this saying around Indigenous futurism that when you want to learn about the apocalypse, you should study the people who have already survived one. This, I think, contributes to the fascination with this material and the remarkable pace of its uptake, especially after a century of neglect. A decade ago, when I edited the Africa SF collection, it seemed a lot like I'd come up with this crazy project to try and figure out what's going on, because I know there's something happening. But now, everyone is reading African science fiction. It's has been fully embraced in contemporary science fiction.

And look at who's winning awards now. It's mostly women, often of African descent. I think it's part of the political potential – not just of science fiction but also of this moment in time – that we can begin to see the world differently and engage with what otherwise is our future. Let's not pretend that just because we're white and privileged, capitalism isn't going to continue privileging us. It shows us where our alliances, affiliations, and politics need to lie.

Two of you have done research in the field of anthropocene which is a concept that was literally invented by scientists to make people feel more responsible for their actions. How does science fiction serve as a platform for exploring this concept, and can it give us any unique insights into humanity's impact on the environment?

Mark Bould: I think one of the key things about the concept of the Anthropocene and one of the ways in which it's been most criticised and rightly criticised is that it observes this phenomena of human impact on geophysical processes but it does nothing to attribute responsibility for it. It treats all humans as equally to blame and that really is not the case. So I think the Anthropocene was a term that had this tremendous flash point moment. The concept goes way back much further. 

It goes back to at least the 1920s in the Soviet Union. Possibly further back than that even. But it's only around the turn of the millennium that it starts to be used more widely. I think science fiction has always been engaged with the Anthropocene but from many different perspectives so if we go back to the science fiction of the late 19th and on to the mid-20th century which really is a colonialist fiction, a fiction about human endeavour, taming nature, a fiction about conquests of people of colour, Mars, the universe. What we're seeing is a kind of unthinking embrace of the Anthropocene as this kind of Promethean urge and potential within humanity.

More recently we've grown up a little bit I hope. So that kind of science fiction is still produced and science fiction that follows those models is still produced but has become more reflective about that philosophy's position underlying the creation, formation, and development of the genre and far more critical of it. So I suspect as last year both the International Commission on Stratigraphy and the International Union of Geological Sciences rejected the formal inclusion of the Anthropocene in the Geological Time Scale, we're going to see a substantial rethinking of it. But that contestation over its meaning was already happening. In my book The Anthropocene Unconscious I put together this list  presented as a kind of poem of 20 or 30 spin-off terms that have developed where everything ends in -cene.

I think what we're going to see now is, well what we've already seen is this tremendous flowering of potential alternative and spin-off terms which have different uses and are put to different uses. Probably the most important of them is Capitalocene. But I think it's that kind of almost Maoist moment of letting a thousand flowers bloom to reconceptualise this passage of time through which we're living and to unleash other potentials in it as well as pin down responsibilities. 

Amy Cutler: I think the one I've always been drawn to is Plantationocene which is the era that we're living in in which the nature around us is defined basically according to its extractive value. And that kind of legislative or definitional language, you know, the need to kind of break out of that. So Plantationocene thinking shapes a lot of my work. I also like MisAnthropocene, and I like Necrocene. 

But even ten years ago or so I remember having conversations about the Anthropocene that were very much focused on rock time and now I'm having conversations that are more focused on the extinct uncanny, and I think those have been very different conversations. I feel that was relevant in what I was thinking out for the conference this year. Have you read that book, Global Nature, Global Culture by Celia Lurie, Sarah Franklin and Jackie Stacey. They tell the story of a kind of global nature culture thinking through three sets of icons. And one of the sets of icons I love is the fossil and the pixel. And the fossil is this imprint. A fossil is a sign of life and a pixel is an imitation of life. 

But they work slightly differently. So a fossil underpins the linear time of natural history. In some ways, a fossil is actually quite a troublesome thing. But the fossil is also a hollow imprint of something that was life. So it is hollow in the same way that a pixel is hollow. But a pixel is very different because it is an uncoding and recoding. So pixels literally are just integer number values for cells on a different screen. That seems so different from a fossil. And they tell this fossil pixel timeline that I find really inspiring. This isn't a new book, but I find it inspiring to revisit it now as well, given some of the conversations this year at the conference around the computational power to redesign futures, scientific possibilities, and somehow even timelines themselves. So my original perceptions of the Anthropocene obviously were a long way away from them over the last decade, hundreds of years, but also just every year I feel like that conversation has become more and more unpicked over the original definitions. 

David Higgins: One of your questions was basically about the unique insights that speculative fiction, that science fiction might have in relation to these environmental issues. I'm so torn. Because on one hand I think that sometimes, especially blockbuster science fiction, is a little bit like contributing to Rome burning and playing the violin while Rome is burning. Because we see these representations of the catastrophes of climate change and the invitation is to devote huge amounts of material resources to creating these blockbuster films and then watch popcorn and be like, oh wow, the world is being destroyed, right? 

And that's really troubling. I think there is a Rome burning problem that can happen with many forms of speculative fiction and of course how things land with audiences might be very different. I think optimally, the better types of speculative fiction address the climate crisis. I think they do so in many different ways. I think one interesting thing is that this is less true now than it was just even a few years ago, but for many people it was hard to take climate issues seriously because they're happening on such a slow scale. 

Now that's maybe changing. But I think that one of the things that speculative fiction can do is to make visible and to give us a sense of impact, like an affective response to or an emotional response to like the kind of what Timothy Morton calls slow violence that is occurring through climate change processes, which is to say like, oh, you know, it's one thing if there's a problem and you can respond to it right away, but climate change is so big and so distributed and so vast and we can't see it because we don't have the time scale as humans to really understand like what's going on. Well, speculative fiction novels, films, and television shows can make visible and make us feel the impact of something that sometimes feels very abstract, feels very distant, even though it's such an intimate part of all of our lives.

Even more than that, really great speculative fiction offers strategies for survival, like resistance and survival in a changing world. To really make clear the kinds of impacts, the dramatic inequities about who will be impacted and how, and who will be benefiting. If you look at William Gibson's most recent works, there's a whole very elite oligarchy of people in one of his futures that hit the jackpot because of climate change, because it makes so many resources available to them as the population declines and they're left with all the cool shit.

I recently finished Ian McDonald's novel Hope Land, which I think is quite extraordinary in this regard. This is a novel that really digs its fingers deeply into imagining how people will have to and will find ways to build pathways towards better futures past the point of no return. 

I don't want to get into a long summary of it, but I think that some speculative fiction novels are really thinking like, okay, so this is happening, and what are we going to do? How are we going to adapt? And what are the right ways to adapt and what are the crappy tech bro ways to adapt?

Amy Cutler: Let's add to the crappy tech bro ways to adapt. I really like that you said that thing about popcorn. This sounds like a weird thing to pick on, but a weird discipline that I want to introduce to the conversation is just through that idea that we sometimes unconsciously say, well, we're just sitting here watching with popcorn. It's like audience studies. What is an audience? And a lot of these conversations are like, what kind of audience should we be? So like, what is witnessing extinction? What is the mediation of species loss? What responsibility does one have as an audience? And audience studies itself is really interesting when you combine it with the ethics of the Anthropocene. So that question of what exactly is an audience, what does it mean? How should that adapt in the right way?

And even in early Greek concepts of tragic entertainment, like, how do we have this idea, is it consoling or what exactly does it mean? But there's a lot of work in audience studies that moves away from the idea of audience towards words like audienceship and audiencing.

This is the idea of an active, responsible audience. I work with nature documentary, but nowadays, there's certainly no charmed circle within which we can all sit and watch the spectacle of climate malfunction unfold. So there's no floating audience. And I think that's a really interesting idea, to undo that. So we invoke quite a lot unconsciously in our comments like your one on popcorn. 

Mark Bould: I will add to this as well. The classic bad, cli-fi movie, The Day After Tomorrow, Roland Emmerich's film from 2004. It's a hilariously bad film in all kinds of ways, with some great moments. But when you read the ecocriticism around climate change cinema, it's always the bad film, the one that's picked on, because there's this kind of bizarre layer of confidence amongst film ecocritics that if you can make the niche documentary, or if a middle class audience will see in an art house that treats climate change thoroughly seriously and sensibly – then that will save the planet.

And what such criticism ignores, first of all, is the agency of the majority of the planet. But it also ignores the fact that the reason climate change entered American journalistic discourse in a way that it did was because of that movie. Climate change suddenly became something on the agenda for many, many more people. So I think one of the things that this film has, amongst the many awful things, are really just the basic criteria of an American blockbuster movie – that the broken family has to be healed by the end of the film, that the father-son relationship has to be redeemed, that Americans have to conquer Mexico. All those kinds of things are there, but they moved an audience. 

And so I was really interested in David talking about the affective dimension as well, because in science fiction studies for so long, it was always about the cognitive, that you have to make people see the world differently and think it through in this kind of pseudo-Brechtian manner. But no, that's only part of what you have to do; but you have to move people as well. You have to affect them. Cognition and affect are not separate. They're useful as kind of dialectical placeholders while you're trying to think about processes, but you have to put them back together at the end. So as terrible as blockbuster cinema can be, it plays a massively important affective role. 

So, no matter how evil Disney actually is as a corporation, their corporate policies around diversity, limited and flawed as they are, are really important because millions and millions and millions of people are seeing these movies. Barbie might have had a very weak, second wave-ish feminist message, but for young girls across the West, that is the most feminist media they will encounter, unless they're going to see Poor Things, but they're too young for that. So that affective realm is really important, and you cannot predict what the response to that will be. And a lot of people will finish the movie, go and have a cup of tea or what have you, but for some people, it'll be life-changing, it'll be world-changing, or a part of a broader series of encounters. You never encounter just the one text, you encounter so many more. And that interaction with a range of texts and people and voices and communities – that is where collective power to change things comes from. 

David Higgins: Yeah, I would agree with that. I think those are great comments, and I love what you say about audiences versus audienceship, Amy. I really do think that there is a huge call in science fiction and speculative genres today towards not being locked in spectatorship, but rather the strong call to action. Many science fiction readers or audiences are engaged in action, sometimes activism. 

You can't read a book like RF Kuang's Babel, which has The Necessity of Violence as part of its subtitle, without thinking that these are the texts that provoke us to feel our implication within. With the social, ecological, economic totality of what's happening in our world, you feel like we must act rather than watch and to just be entertained. So I think that's exactly right.

Next question was suggested by a friend of mine who is a feminist activist. I hope you don't mind its provocative nature. Does feminist science fiction make the world a better place?

David Higgins: There are many forms of science fiction that I think, and it's both the case that forms of science fiction that explicitly label themselves as feminist in a flag-waving kind of way, are reaching more than just audiences that are preconceived to be their friends. Indeed, my research primarily focuses on reactionary movements. The more radical something is in its politics, the more likely it is to be banned. And people who were initially uninterested in the book are more likely to read it out of curiosity. Like, for example, Maia Kobabe's book, "Gender Queer," which isn't exactly sort of trans science fiction rather than feminist science fiction, but, to just use an example, that is a book that I think has done something: it gets people to read it, and it gets people to think about it. 

So if you write like hardcore, extremely strong-political feminist science fiction, you will reach more than just your already sympathetic audience. Because there will be reactions to it, and that will create discourse. And there are a lot of examples of how that actually happens. So that's one thing.

And I think there are many forms of science fiction that are feminist; depending on what you mean by feminist or what era of feminism, there are all sorts of feminism that are occurring in all sorts of speculative fiction and all sorts of popular narratives that are touching people's lives in all kinds of ways. I think that it's more likely now that in speculative fiction of all kinds, even stuff that wouldn't be like feminist science fiction has a label on it at the bookstore. I think there's so many types of science fiction now that it's more likely that science fiction will not take gender categories for granted and not take white male, white masculine protagonists for granted, also within video games, and also within television. I think that has an effect. I think that changes the way that we all inhabit the world, how we inhabit our gender identities, how we consider possibilities for gendered life, for engendering life perhaps, or re-gendering life in different kinds of ways.

So I respect where your friend is coming from with that question. I think echo chambers are a real thing. And there is a problem when it comes to getting more narrowly and tightly into those sorts of echo chambers. I don't experience that as occurring within feminist science fiction. Actually, I've personally encountered that happening more in right wing media, which often caricatures feminist science fiction, right, in shallow stereotypical terms, in order to respond negatively to it without ever having read it or thought about it or taken it seriously. I think echo chambers are more about reducing how we understand things down to simplistic tweet stereotypes, rather than the complex reality of what we see in actual speculative art. 

Mark Bould: Feminist anything generally makes the world better. And I think one of the ways this has happened through science fiction, in which science fiction has been a key player and often not recognized, is you're reading feminist science fiction of the 60s and 70s and 80s and you'll get some people experimenting with pronouns. You read Ann Leckie and that kind of disjuncture between biology and biological sex and gender has become more commonplace. The recognition that there are not two genders, there are many genders, has become central to the science fiction imaginary, not least through the award winning success of Ann Leckie. And that shift to people no longer having to feel, admittedly mostly in very privileged Western settings, but not having to feel tied to outmoded gender notions is really important.

I see it transforming the lives of my students every day of the week. The fact that they can be non-binary, they can use different pronouns. They can try and figure out who they are and what best describes them. And that is a genuine good thing and science fiction played a key role in it. And it's sort of the mainstreaming of an element of feminist science fiction of an earlier generation going on there. 

Amy Cutler: I read a lot of science fiction that relates to non-human thinking of gender. And I always have. So I almost can't imagine reading science fiction that isn't already feminist, but more than feminist. And then the earlier, Victorian turn of science fiction also shapes a lot of my work, because I work with specific media technologies and I'm very interested in insects and ecology, and in specimens and the overlaps between science and storytelling, and the way that we've always drawn lessons for humans from our science specimens as a really dangerous pedagogy. 

What I'm looking at is popular science and the forms of romantic anthropomorphism that exist in these that need to be addressed in terms of life and labour – labour in both senses, the word surrogacy or gendered labour, even how you spawn and pupate. Those are the ways of reinventing texts that I find really exciting. Those moments of handover as well, like the moment when people realise that bee hives were run by queens, not kings is great because you get all these really kind of horrified, but also lascivious texts by male authors that were like, no, there's no more King bees! So discovery of new entities and behaviours leads to a new perspective.

I kind of love horrifying mother-machine-insect-plant-fungus type books. So I would say that most of what I read is pretty queer on doing gender anyway, in the way it dialogues with existing and emerging cultures of science and norms of identity and production. So maybe that means that I can't quite address the question because it's hard to imagine science fiction not taking that kind of challenge.

David Higgins: The way of putting some of what you just said, it is just sort of crystallised for me. I think that today, all science fiction that isn't specifically anti-feminist is feminist science fiction. And there are greater degrees of foregrounding that, but it has become part of the fabric of speculative imagining these days.

Okay, the last one. What should a person do if they want to become a successful science fiction writer? And how much does a writer need to know about science to write convincingly?

Mark Bould: Obviously the first thing you must do to be a successful science fiction writer is be a feminist. To be honest, science fiction is such a vast and varied field that there's so much of it where you really don't need to know an awful lot about science to be able to write it and to write well and write good and interesting science fiction. There are other kinds of science fiction where you need to understand really hard physics and maths and things like that. But the thing that all writers need more than a grasp of science is a grasp of fiction writing. There are great hard science fiction writers, after a lifetime of reading this stuff, the actual workings of the science they're using completely eludes me, but their capacity to turn that into narrative, to make you care, even if you don't fully understand is what makes for good science fiction. That is, if we're going to restrict science fiction to narrative forms.

The second part of the question is whether the focus on technology conceals a sort of a philosophy, or a lack thereof. It's often concealing many things. And at the same time, if you read carefully, revealing exactly those things as well. So, you know, the kind of tech-pro science fiction that's successful has a politics to it that is easy to read, whether you agree with it or not. But I think that vision isn't equally visible to readers. So Elon Musk and his AI guys claim to be inspired by Iain M. Banks's Culture novels. But clearly what mean by that is they're inspired by that image of what General AI could be about and at the same time completely miss the point of those novels. Iain would slap them both very hard, were he still with us. So what you're going to find is a very rich and textured field where there is not a single answer to any part of that question. Collectively, I'm sure we could point you to examples that demonstrate this or demonstrate that and all the positions in between.  

David Higgins: I would say probably you should ask someone other than a not particularly successful science fiction critic – like maybe an actual science fiction writer who is successful. But it's very subjective. And the science fiction that I like, which is not always written by particularly successful science fiction writers, seems to really think deeply about something. Whether that's a technological process, or it shows that someone has learned or thought about something very deeply, not just about the lived experience of day to day life and the way that might live in mimetic fiction of the more classical type, but it's really like, I've taken a deep dive into language or I've taken a deep dive into some sort of thinking about technology, not just as a fantasy, but from some inner understanding of that technology, or I've thought really deeply about society or psychology or philosophy or some intersection of those things. 

Do I think it needs to be overly technological? No, there's a lot of brilliant science fiction that's not particularly technology oriented. But I think the types of science fiction that I like do show that the writer has really taken some time to think very deeply, to learn about the world in a way that changes what they take for granted about the world and then to share that change of what they take for granted about the world with others through their fiction. That would be a thing that I would recommend if I had students who were doing this. 

Amy Cutler: I think there's something to also knowing what your skill set is and applying it, because it's partly a question of pedagogy in the sense that you may not be trained in the way that some people are trained in that science, but you have the absolute right to interrogate it as long as you are applying the skill set that you can bring usefully to that conversation and the existing habits of thought. 

I work in my practice with palaeontologists, with mathematical physicists, with biologists. I used to be a lecturer in bioart. So I'm quite interested in that artistic practice and science crossover and how collaborations work, but also how critical collaborations work. For instance, I was working with physicists, and ended up making a series of semi-fictional films with a couple of people. I really disagreed with the physicists' work, but it was an incredibly interesting process where there was this article about what's now called the Penrose process, from 1971. So it was this hypothesis that when the sun finally burns out, that's alright because we'll just fish energy from black holes. And it had this diagram of how we will do our black hole fishing. And we've now seen this in science fiction novels – for instance, Arthur C Clarke's Fountains of Paradise from 1979 which explores the grandiosity of the projects, and galactic space elevators. But I love the fact that even in contemporary articles from 2021 or 2022, the language was very much like, how can we do this? How can we fish the energy from a black hole? Where will we do this? And never should we do this.

But you might have a skill set you can bring and it might be a certain way of asking why or a certain way of saying something. Maybe it's close reading skills. Maybe it's some kind of hermeneutics that you can bring as a challenge. You're not just a total amateur - and actually science fiction already has a constructive relationship with amateurs and so does science. So I think there's something really interesting there in the pedagogy of how you can critically go into these fields of practice which are themselves regimes of knowledge and language, in a way that's a thoughtful intervention. And I guess that would be an important skill set for testing new kinds of storytelling.

Mark Bould is a reader in film and literature at UWE Bristol, co-editor of the journal Science Fiction Film and Television and of the book series Studies in Global Science Fiction.

Amy Cutler is an artist and scholar, cultural geographer, curator, writer, and filmmaker who works with ideas of geography and nonhuman others, and has contributed to an experimental documentary genre.

David M. Higgins is associate professor of English and chair of the department of humanities and communication at Embry‑Riddle Worldwide. He is also a senior editor for the Los Angeles Review of Books and a prize winning sci-fi author.

Science Fiction Research Association was founded in 1970. It's open access journal SFRA Review is published four times a year and the SFRA meets annually for a conference at varying international locations.

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