ABSTRACT
The chapter introduces the book’s aims, contents, and key framework: the alien encounter. It discusses how this framing is inspired by feminist science fiction and explains how the latter reclaimed it from conventional science fiction, reconfiguring it from a hostile event with colonial connotations to a platform for critical-affirmative reflections on pathways to establish mutually enriching and caring relations of companionship across racialized, gendered, and species borders. The chapter further reflects on defamiliarization and estrangement as central tools in these reconfigurations. It argues that thinking with feminist science fiction and with participatory research methods, used in relation to the more-than-human world, gives access to these tools as critical-affirmative entry points to processes of unlearning human exceptionalism – processes which it is one of the book’s main aims to inspire readers to engage in. Secondly, the chapter introduces three alien figures – Vulgar slugs, the micro-algae diatoms, and familiars (tricksterous helpers of witches) – who, together with the three human co-authors, perform as the book’s protagonists. The authors make themselves accountable for their relationships with these figures and motivate their appearance in the book. Finally, the chapter provides an outline of the book’s composition, its mixed-genre style, combining artistic, poetic, and philosophical working modes.
