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Esterino Adami Francesca Bellino Alessandro MengozziOther Worlds and the Narrative Construction of Otherness

2019; Volume: 46; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/sfs.2019.0074

2327-6207

Bodhisattva Chattopadhyay,

Diverse academic and cultural studies

394 SCIENCE FICTION STUDIES, VOLUME 46 (2019) the views of his sf contemporaries earlier in the text. Despite treating the city as an assemblage with emergent properties for half the book, the richer sections are the ones that remember that cities are nothing without the humans populating them. They may be greater than the sum of their parts, but it is ultimately the parts that keep our attention. When Abbott chastises a lack of interest in explaining how Coruscant, the planet-sized capital in the Star Wars universe, works to an urban planner, it is by pointing out that much of the plot occurs in conference rooms. Yet conference rooms are precisely where much of contemporary human drama is acted out. So what of climate fiction and New York 2140, then? Reading Imagining Urban Futures, I felt that something like a monograph on Robinson’s novel (and recent work) or at least a book treating a smaller archive of texts would be far more rewarding to planners and literary critics interested in the future of the city than this text, which is too broad in its focus. As Abbott already hints, the importance Robinson gives to civic duty suggests a path to the future for those concerned about the UN’s warnings. In New York 2140, Robinson uses the conceit of a MetLife Tower overlooking a flooded Madison Square Bacino as a starting point from which the simple diversity and various networks of information, power, or whatever, that hold cities together can effect change. Here live a detective, a financial analyst, homeless hackers, orphaned wharf rat children, a superintendent with a past in salvaging, a media star, and a community organizer. This group then uses their various network connections and cooperates—and this seems to be the central Robinsonian word—to hatch a scheme to wrest control of capital from the endlessly speculating financial markets of, among other places, lower Manhattan. In other words, the novel provides opportunities to present the city as a member of many of Abbott’s eight categories and, by crossing over them, it also demonstrates how technology and society are connected as well. The later chapters of Imagining Urban Futures begin to show that Abbott clearly understands this. It is a shame, then, that it is hidden from the readers in the rest of the book and in the book’s own structure.—Moacir P. de Sá Pereira, Columbia University Otherworldly Fantasies, Short on Space. Esterino Adami, Francesca Bellino, and Alessandro Mengozzi, eds. Other Worlds and the Narrative Construction of Otherness. Torino, Italy: Mimesis International, 2017. 210 pp. $18.00/£14.00/€16,00 pbk, £7.99 ebk. As the title suggests, the focus of Other Worlds and the Narrative Construction of Otherness is not sf, even if the “Other Worlds” part seems to indicate its relevance for sf studies. Only four of the ten essays deal with sf, while two others loosely graze the territory. This is not necessarily a bad thing, but it does work against the cohesion of the volume as a whole. Nevertheless, some of the essays deal with lesser-known works of sf from around the world or throw light on little-studied works. In this review, I will only deal with the essays on sf. 395 BOOKS IN REVIEW The book is divided into four brief sections. The first section, “Other Spaces, New Worlds,” is the one most directly relevant. Alessandra Consolaro looks at the little known early Hindi novel Baisvi Sadi [Twenty-second Century] by Rahul Sankrityayan (1923). While the work itself now feels quite antiquated, its historical importance to Indian kalpavigyan [sf] can hardly be understated. Consolaro argues that in Baisvi Sadi, Sankrityayan builds a model of alternative modernity that was also utopian, one of transnationalism and glocalism, that could not be accommodated within the political systems of the time. Sankrityayan’s vision still retains faith in technology and progress rather than primitivism. The protagonist of the narrative falls asleep and wakes up after 200 years to a utopian society; the rest of the narrative has the shape of a travelogue that takes him through this utopian world and its features. Unsurprisingly, many early sf works followed...