ABSTRACT
This chapter highlights works of SF that negotiate differently with the possibility of unveiling a futurity that might diverge from the present. The “alternative histories” that form Bodard’s SF, for example, suggest that the future cannot be inconsistent with the past and present: that Vietnam is an intergalactic power in the far-future of the Xuya Universe depends on an entirely different historical narrative. Four of the stories that comprise Regueiro and Robles’s Historias del Crazy Bar also explore instances of colonialism in the future that are anchored in Europe’s “real” history of colonial exploitation. This chapter shows that re-imagining the position and purpose of humanity depends on tracing the production of gender and race-based thinking across time and space. The works of SF are set in conversation with Spivak’s humanistic concept of the “planetary”—which is triggered by a reflection on the historicity of race and gender—and Gilroy’s anti-racist reprisal of humanism, which critically re-reads of the racist tendencies of the Enlightenment. Contemporary women’s SF often suggests that extreme racist and sexist political agendas are in danger of dominating subsequent centuries unless we imagine our futures “otherwise”.
