Deletion—Deviation: The Perversions of Science Fiction

Call for Papers

Science Fiction exists in a state of tension between the pleasurable and the perverse — of the pleasure gained from its fictive forms, and the perversions of facts and flesh within its speculative futures, imagined worlds and creative appropriations of technological innovation.
There is an immutable thread that runs throughout science fiction, that which “distinguishes its fictional worlds to one degree or another from the world in which we live” (Roberts, 2000), worlds perhaps characterised by Darko Suvin’s ‘estrangement’ or Samuel Delaney’s ‘reading/writing effects.’ The ways in which this distinction is maintained traces the nebulous line between the pleasurable and perverse in science fiction. How does the pleasure of its fiction collide with the perversions of the ‘world in which we live’?
This symposium looks to the very edge of science fictional possibilities, at the many perversions and pleasures that can…