Review: <i>Spatialities of Speculative Fiction: Re-Mapping Possibilities, Philosophies, and Territorialities</i>, by Gwilym Lucas Eades

Science fiction does not just explore space: it generates spaces.From the freaks of scale inherent to interstellar travel to the electronic shadow universes of cyberpunk, sf has proven uniquely powerful at producing new conceptions of space and setting.Sf and fantasy writers together have dreamed up countless secondary worlds and populated them with invented landscapes, cities, and countries.Eades analyzes speculative fiction's remarkable fecundity in generating new ways of thinking about space, i.e., spatiality.Borrowing from Derek Gregory, Eades defines spatialities as "the ways in which mobile constellations of power-knowledge and subject positions are constituted through the production and performance of space as an 'ordering' rather than a fixed and closed order" (qtd.1).Eades also explores how mapping-both literal and metaphorical-affects this production and performance of space.One of the methodological commitments of Spatialities of Speculative Fiction is to resist hard border policing among science fiction, fantasy, horror, and their subgenres.This is because, Eades argues, speculative fiction is not a discrete genre but a hyperobject, which he defines as a massive, complex assemblage of elements sprawled across spacetime and in a constant state of evolution.The hyperobject cannot be reduced to a fixed set of texts or formal conventions; Eades draws comparisons between it and John Rieder's emphasis on speculative fiction's mutability and historical contingency in his Science Fiction and the Mass Cultural Genre System (2017).Eades argues that "gathering up spatialities into generic forms also often escapes those forms it seeks to map" (4).Therefore, to better map the speculative fiction hyperobject and understand the spatialities it produces, Eades employs different conceptual models throughout the book that allow him to veer between genres and collage texts together as needed.Often these conceptual models are themselves spatial: chapter three and chapter four employ a spectrum and Venn diagram respectively.The purpose of these unique models is "to push the boundaries of the discussion of speculative fiction in multiple new directions" (74).Chapter two consists of an extended comparative analysis of Neuromancer (1984) and Pattern Recognition (2003) by William Gibson and Anathem (2008) and Fall; or, Dodge in Hell (2019) by Neal Stephenson.The chapter is titled "Cyberpunctum, " a pun on cyberpunk and punctus contra punctum, the Latin term for musical counterpoint, suggesting the fugal structure of this section.