Starboard Vineyard Tours

For this episode, we read Joseph D. Andriano's Immortal Monster: The Mythological Evolution of the Fantastic Beast in Modern Fiction and Film (1999). Andriano reads his primary texts - an eclectic collection, from Moby Dick to Jaws , King Kong to Grendel (1971) - as the great myth of the immortal monster, transformed over the decades and by different creators' hands. For him this myth speaks to ou...

This month's reading is upsettingly timely, as we read Jordan S. Carroll's Speculative Whiteness: Science Fiction and the Alt-Right (2024). Carroll covers both the historical uses of science fiction by the far right, and the current ways white nationalists imagine the future and read the genre. Topics include: fans being slans and the genre of the mutational romance; klan being fans and the "herme...

This month, we read Kingsley Amis's provocatively titled New Maps of Hell (1960) - in which Amis sets forth a his account of the nature and hopes of science fiction at the end of what's often called the Golden Age. New Maps has been often referenced in works we've read so far, and ends up something of an eccentric snapshot of a moment in the genre, a commentary on the state of the genre through Am...

For this (belated - apologies!) episode, Mark is joined by guests Jackson and Nora of Anomalous Readings and other fine podcasts. We read John Moore's “Miracle Stalker: Personal and Social Transformation in Arkady and Boris Strugatsky's Roadside Picnic ”, published in Foundation in fall 1997. The article starts out with some strong Freudian claims and then goes on to mostly talk about other stuff,...

For this episode, we read Pilgrims Through Space and Time: Trends and Patterns in Scientific and Utopian Fiction , J.O. Bailey's 1947 book about the emerging genre of “scientific fiction”: its history, its plots, and its value. Quite a bit of the first two, especially, as a large portion of the book is catalogue and summary, and frankly it was a bit of a slog, but it still holds great interest for...

For this episode, we read Graham J. Murphy's article “Cyberpunk's masculinist legacy: Puppetry, labour and ménage à trois in Blade Runner 2049 ” published in Science Fiction Film and Television , in a symposium on the legacy of Blade Runner . This continues our string of articles, and gives us a chance to think about a movie we both enjoy and dynamics we both find fascinating. Murphy both interest...

This episode we read an article on a mission: "Shadows of the Empire/A New Hope: A Dialectical Critique of Gender Historicization and Utopian Desire in Isabel Fall's “Helicopter Story”" by JD Fulloon, which is a mouthful, and was published in the May 2024 issue of Transgender Studies Quarterly. Fulloon's goal is to engage with "Helicopter Story" not for the controversies surrounding its publicatio...

For this episode, we read Gary Westfahl's The Mechanics of Wonder: The Creation of the Idea of Science Fiction (1998). This book frustrated us quite a bit with its insistence that the fundamental nature of science fiction was defined in the 20s and has not changed since. On the other hand, we came away with a new appreciation for its central figures, Hugo Gernsback and John W. Campbell, Jr., espec...

This episode, we read an article from the most recent issue of Science Fiction Studies , one that touches on topics near and dear to our hearts. With “Toward a Science-Fictional Interpretational Method: Reading Three Borges Stories” by Michael O'Krent, we get to engage both with science-fictional reading and the work of Jorge Luis Borges. O'Krent proposes a way to define science fiction around a D...

This month, we read “The Working Planetologist: Speculative Worlds and the Practice of Climate Science” by Katherine Buse, which is the second chapter of Practices of Speculation: Modeling, Embodiment, Figuration (2020), an anthology collection of pieces on speculation. This article in particular is about Dune and its impact on climate science as a field, so we get into discussions of kangaroo rat...

This month, we took a brief dip into a different medium with The World Is Born From Zero: Understanding Speculation and Video Games (2022), by Cameron Kunzelman, and got into the mechanics of speculation. This book crosses both science fiction studies and game studies, with a significant infusion of speculative materialism/realism, so there’s a number of new ideas to juggle as we talk over Kunzelm...

This month we read the book with the best title in SF studies, Seo-Young Chu's Do Metaphors Dream of Literal Sleep? A Science-Fictional Theory of Representation (2010), which was also formative in both of our trajectories in SF studies. We discuss Chu's approach to science fictional language as lyricism, the absence (or omnipresence?) of science fictional poetry, and consider how she recasts Suvin...

This month, we read Carl Freedman’s Critical Theory and Science Fiction (2000) and continue our journey through the Suvinian tradition. We discuss a lot of the first thing, critical theory, and a lot of the second thing, science fiction. We consider the connections he draws between various philosophers and critics on the one hand and various classics of SF, especially New Wave SF, ranging from Sol...

This month, we read John Rieder's Colonialism and the Emergence of Science Fiction , and talk a lot about Victorian SF and BHBMFFF (big-headed baby men from the far future). We talk through Rieder's way of reading the period's SF as inverting, rotating, and distorting the colonial perspective from within the colonial perspective, and discuss a lot of weird old SF stories that he touches on in the...

In this episode, join us as we read a selection of short pieces on Mary Shelley's Frankenstein , and discuss that epochal novel's place in science fiction and in discourse - only one of our four pieces is strictly a work of science fiction studies, but all four help us grapple with the discussion around Frankenstein and how attitudes towards the novel have changed. Join us and get mad at outdated...

This month, we continue reading Darko Suvin’s Metamorphoses of Science Fiction - On the Poetics and History of a Literary Genre (1979). In this second half, History, it’s safe to say Ben and Mark find a lot more to disagree with than in the first half – not unlike many other SF scholars before us. Suvin’s long history of SF presents the genre as a transhistorical literature, something that emerges...

This month, we’re exploring one of the founding texts of Science Fiction studies - Darko Suvin’s Metamorphoses of Science Fiction - On the Poetics and History of a Literary Genre (1979), available on the Internet Archive . In the first half of the book, Poetics, Suvin lays out his full theory of cognitive estrangement as the nature of SF and his own particular goals and hopes for the genre, and it...

A quick update about Detect or Die, a new TTRPG Ben wrote and Mark edited, that’s going to be available on Ben’s Itch Page HERE , and then the project page HERE starting August 25th ! Also, if you are interested, August 25th is Itch.io Creator Day, so Ben would certainly appreciate first-day downloads! There’s an example of play HERE , and in this audio update, Ben explains how SF studies influenc...

This episode, we’re going to delve into the nonfiction writings of Joanna Russ, one of the major writers and critics of the New Wave of science fiction. She’s best known for The Female Man (1975) - a striking novel that we’ve both been meaning to read, we swear. The collection To Write Like A Woman: Essays in Feminism and Science Fiction (1995) covers a lot of ground, so we’ve selected a set of es...

We try to encapsulate all of The Seven Beauties of Science Fiction . Istvan Csicsery-Ronay, Jr., puts forward a collection of seven broad ideas for the discussion of science fiction, producing a rich survey of the genre and a very clear structure for this episode. While the Seven Beauties does not set out to present a single overarching theory of SF, we discuss the implicit throughline of play and...

In our inaugural episode, we read "About 5,750 Words," Samuel R. Delany's classic essay on the language of science fiction. Delany theorizes the experience of reading, seeing each work of fiction as a sequence of word-images, each changing and correcting the reader's mental picture of what they have already read. (These pictures even include Delany's vision of "the", an alien creature we discuss i...