NOR Sci Fi Style

Science Fiction is the theme of the newest issue of New Orleans Review. Editor Timothy Welsh opens the issue by asking “Why do we enjoy science fiction?” Then explores an answer: “Perhaps it is not the fantastic at all. Perhaps it is instead how science fiction is always in some way about the present. It is an exaggeration, a recontextualization, a defamiliarization. Science fiction takes some aspect of life in the present and blows it out to its logical extremes to see where things breakdown. The best science fiction gives us ways to think about our actual lived circumstances, unencumbered by material reality and with the perspective gained by getting a little bit of distance.”

Welsh considers, though, that in our age of exponential advancements in science and technology, it becomes more challenging to see any great “distance.” He then asks, “What distance is there to take as the stuff of science fiction rapidly becomes the stuff of our everyday?” That is the challenge faced by the contributors to this issue, and as Welsh notes, “though they take and use the tools of the genre, the alternative worlds they imagine do not seem so far off. . . . Perhaps we will find they are closer to home than we expect.”

Contributors to this special issue include Sara Batkie, C. Wade Bentley, Scott Brennan, Gerry Canavan, Sarah Crossland, Michael George, Taylor Gorman, Jeremy Allan Hawkins, Daryl Jones, Greg Keeler, Paige Lewis, Michael Marberry, James Maynard, Lincoln Michel, Danielle Mitchell, Lo Kwa Mei-En, Emil Ostrovski, Elizabeth Lindsey Rogers, John Paul Rollert, Bethany Schultz Hurst, Adrian Van Young, and Lesley Wheeler.