CFP: Futurologies & science fiction (2023/1)

Issue editors: Piotr Gorliński-Kucik, Michał Kłosiński, Monika Lubińska

One of the first and most important tasks undertaken by science fiction was literary futurology. Attempts to anticipate the near and distant futures, the development of technology, civilization, or the human species, had become the most essential determinants of this convention, which was, over time, expanded by radio, comics, television, films, graphics and video games.
Over the past decades, the dominants of SF had changed: it transformed into a diagnosis of the present day, had sparked with utopian impulses, built historiosophical parables, experimented with style and language, explored popcultural plot patterns, as well as catastrophic and post-apocalyptic speculations. For the most part SF has envisioned the future (also within the framework of retro-futuristic narratives), even if this future is "science-fiction reality" in which we operate today: the era of globalized capitalism of transnational corporations, dense with interconnections of various spheres of life and technology (these threads are successfully explored today by global post-cyberpunk, biopunk, cli-fi, weird fiction).
Since "(...) the future always looks different than we can imagine (...)" (Lem, 1999), the upcoming issue of "The Silesian Journal of Polish Studies" (1/2023) will be dedicated to these imagined futures: speculative, possible, impossible and alternative.
Therefore, we are interested in the extent to which literary futurology can provide predictions of the future, as "Literature for futurology is more or less like psychoanalysis to computed tomography of the brain" (Dukaj 2004): both of them offer slightly different, but nevertheless valuable findings and diagnoses. Thus, we pose the fundamental question about the essence of the “predictions of the future”: are these an effective extrapolation of the observed trends, designing subsequent stages of history on the basis of well-known historiosophical projects, or maybe simply a forecast of specific events, phenomena and discoveries? What is the significance of the proliferation of science fiction visual cultures (Frelik 2017), the changing, world-creating paradigms (Maj 2019), or the undeniable effects of the Anthropocene (Haraway 2017) for the contemporary futurology?
Finally, perhaps the legitimacy of forging literary and non-literary (transmedial) visions of the future lies in the construction of eutopian and dystopian narratives: compensatory, critical or designing changes (Jameson 2011). If so, then how can we capitalize these "utopian laboratories of social imagination" (Toffler 1998), to what extent can they help us prepare for the inevitable changes and guide us to a brighter future?

We invite submissions inspired by the following ideas and topics:
• the status and character of literary futurology as a discourse or narrative, and their cognitive determinants;
• political, social and cultural entanglements of the visions of the future;
• the effectiveness of literary futurologies: hit and miss extrapolations;
• eutopian and dystopian turns in science fiction, science fiction as uchronia;
• ontology of the fantastic chronotopes;
• science fiction historiosophies and extrapolation methods in "soft" and "hard" SF;
• “science-fictional” reality of the 21st century;
• post apocalypse and retrofuturism as a reverse of futurology;
• climate fiction, speculations about the Anthropocene, eco-topian fiction.

Articles should be submitted by 12 June 2022 through the OJS system: https://journals.us.edu.pl/index.php/SSP.
Guidelines for authors available here: https://www.journals.us.edu.pl/index.php/SSP/about/submissions
Contact: slaskiestudiapolonistyczne@us.edu.pl