SEXTANT: masculinities, sexualities & decolonialities

ABSTRACT

Alexis Lothian (2018) notes that speculative and science-fiction is a genre that can offer its “cultural producers” the opportunity to speculatively imagine alternative realities and futures by narratively “reconfigur[ing]” the socio-political conditions of their present moment (p. 18). This article employs a queer futurities and temporalities framework to examine two speculative, science-fiction novels—namely Leviathan Wakes by James S.A. Corey and This is How You Lose the Time War by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone—and both novels’ capacities to imagine alternative, speculative futures to our present late-capitalist, neoliberal socio-political moment. In making such an analysis, this article considers both novels’ representations of gender and sexuality as well as each novel’s war narratives to consider how queerness in its affectual and temporal relationality might offer novel opportunities for the genre of speculative and science-fiction in imagining possible futures beyond the confines of our current late-capitalist, neo-liberal and heteronormative socio-political parameters. 

KEY WOrDS

futurity; queer temporality; speculative fiction; heteronormativity; neoliberalism

Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.