SF + Extraction Conference, Online, 8th and 9th October, 2022 Reviewed by Graham Head Artwork by co-director Angela YT Chan This two-day conference was organised by the London Science Fiction Research Community (LSFRC), with support from Birkbeck, University of London. This was the third wholly online annual conference held by the LSFRC since the beginning of the pandemic, although this event was somewhat smaller than its predecessors. Making use of the online technology, speakers and audience were again drawn from across the world, and from many different perspectives.  Although the noti ..read more

By Grace Catherine Greiner This story begins with a book that was given, and then taken away.  It was Christmas Eve, the night my family and I traditionally exchange gifts.  My youngest sister took her turn doling out packages, many of them small, rectangular—the size of books.  My brother and I were recipients of two such similarly-sized, book-shaped packages.  We were instructed to open them simultaneously (with the caveat that they might be mixed up, that I might be holding his, and vice versa).  I tore off the wrapping paper from my book and behold: it was the wron ..read more

By Simon O’Sullivan  What is at stake with tabletop roleplaying games? That is, besides the entertainment they offer (or besides their status as games)? Although I no longer play them as immersively as I once did (the phase of truly being in those worlds was relatively short, perhaps four years from age twelve or so to sixteen), they have had a determining effect on my imaginary and, I think, on the various life choices I have made (in many ways the art and ‘theory’ worlds I have lived in and moved through seem—in retrospect—a logical progression from those other worlds, albeit thes ..read more

By Gautam Bhatia As a genre committed to exploring “alternatives to how we live”, questions of justice have always been at the forefront of contemporary SF writing. One of the most frequently recurring themes has been that of crime and punishment: indeed, SF’s focus on technology has allowed writers to explore a range of questions related to criminal justice, from policing (Philip K. Dick’s “precogs” come to mind) to prisons. Some of the most interesting thinking has considered entirely alternative forms of criminal justice altogether: for example, Alastair Reynold’s The Prefect gives us a bri ..read more

By Jo Lindsay Walton NightCafe AI’s response to “Sunflowers, Van Gogh” Klara and The Sunflowers This issue’s cover was created by an AI. Or … was it?[1] Machines have made art for a long time. In the mid 19th century, John Clark’s Eureka machine was dropping perfectly okay Latin hexameter bars on the daily. Harold Cohen’s AARON began scribbling in the 1970s and sketching plants and people in the 1980s. But with the likes of MidJourney, DALL-E, Stable Diffusion, Disco Diffusion, Imagen, and Dream by Wombo, 2022 marks the start of a new era. These AIs accept natural language prompts and produce ..read more

By Guangzhao Lyu  Oslo, 2022, co-hosted by CoFutures “Futures from the Margins”—the theme of this year’s annual conference of Science Fiction Research Association (SFRA)—reminds me immediately of Paul Kincaid’s review of The Cambridge History of Science Fiction (2019) co-edited by Gerry Canavan and Eric Carl Link, published in Extrapolation 61.1. Kincaid claims that this anthology challenges the American-centric history of sf and re-writes it with a hope of amplifying the previously repressed voices from the “unseen” worlds—voices from China, South and South-Eastern Asia, Eastern Europe ..read more

By Peter Zupanc Isn’t capitalist system, which humans invented 200 years ago, growing into an uncontrollable beast that will devour human society? Clock of Babel runs the whole world to the same rhythm of time.1]  The Cabinet The Cabinet starts with a description of the cabinet. Inside, there are files of amazing people. A man who is turning into a tree, a woman who is growing a lizard instead of a tongue, and many more. This is not regarded as much of a mystery, and we never learn what is the mechanism of their transformation. The fantastic simply exists, not to be questioned, though f ..read more

By Christy Dena and Yen Ooi This article contains moderate spoilers, so please do watch the film before reading! Yen: Everything Everywhere All At Once is a 2022 film by Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert. I watched it on a quiet weekday morning at a lush cinema with only two other people in the room. I laughed out loud and cried real tears, many times throughout. It’s a habit of mine to stay to the end of film credits to appreciate the number of people (who made it and those who didn’t) it took to make the film, and this time, I didn’t want to leave. I wanted to stay in the cinema to try and h ..read more

Emma Johanna Puranen Introduction As Le Guin famously put it, “science fiction is not predictive; it is descriptive”. Science fiction reflects what its writers see in the world around them—often from current scientific discoveries—and it sparks ideas for scientists. Scientists and SF writers endlessly inspire each other in a classic chicken-or-egg scenario. But little research has been done on how exactly this inspiration happens — on the dialogues and interactions between these two often-overlapping groups. Given SF’s reputation for applied speculation and future thinking, these dialogues ar ..read more

Laura Pereira [1,2], Guillermo Ortuño Crespo [2], Silvana Juri [3], Patrick Keys [4], Hannah Lübker [2], Andrew Merrie [2], Edoardo Superchi [2], Naomi Terry [2], Bwalya Chibwe [2], Juliano Palacios-Abrantes [5, 6], Maria A. Gasalla [7], Erick Ross Salazar [8], Moriaki Yasuhara [9,10], Farah Obaidullah [11], Gabrielle Carmine [12], Salomão Bandeira [13], Diva J. Amon [14, 15], Ghassen Halouani [16], David E. Johnson [17], Lynne J. Shannon [18], Jean-Baptiste Jouffray [2], Colette C.C. Wabnitz [6, 19], Beth Fulton [20] Introduction Ever since humans ventured into the ocean to fish fo ..read more