Special issue ‘Geographies of science fiction’: introduction

This special issue aims to explore the geographies of science fiction (SF) as the literary genre that best interrogates our relationship to space. The analysis of SF is a lively field in literary and cultural studies, yet geography’s engagement with it so far has been limited. This lacuna is certainly surprising, in that it leaves SF’s unique geographical affordances – the functions that SF texts can be made to perform in a given context – unattended. As a mode of writing that is rooted in fictional mechanisms of displacement and deterritorialisation, SF enables spaces of reflection/diffraction that make our current predicament understandable and actable upon. In a time of unprecedented planetary crisis – one that entails extreme precarity and looming erasure – attending to the affordances of SF from a geographical perspective can help us rethink the ways we shape and relate to the space that we inhabit.