Reading Science Fiction Politically – Spring 2024 Season

The Science and Visionary Fiction reading group meets weekly to read and discuss science, visionary and speculative fiction that bears on politics, the environment, and the struggle for a better future for all. We focus on the concept of visionary fiction, emerging from Octavia Butler’s writings and beautifully articulated ten years ago by Walidah Imarisha, “To Build a Future Without Police and Prisons, We Have to Imagine It First.” 

While far from earthbound, and while not immune from reexamining the past or imagining, we do so to stay with the present, and with paths forward that do need new envisioning and imagining.

This year, our selections have explored how artificial and nonhuman intelligence heighten both contradictions and possibilities. In the best of contemporary science fiction (and science fiction-adjacent) writing, conflicts over these issues illustrate the larger dimensions of social conflict today.

To start the spring season, we will read Ray Nayler’s 2022 novel, The Mountain in the Sea. Nayler’s novel encompasses these themes–nonhuman (octopus) intelligence, artificial intelligence, climate justice and capitalist disregard for the earth, all in intensely human terms.

Join in now to help select the additional titles to add to our current list.