In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

  • Introduction
  • Lisa Yaszek (bio) and Doug Davis (bio)

Scientists and engineers have long identified science fiction (SF) as a key source of inspiration for their work. The history of science in the twentieth century is full of new devices and new modes of technoscientific labor that appeared first in genre fiction: Leo Szilard attributed his groundbreaking work on nuclear chain reactions to H. G. Wells’s 1914 story “The World Set Free”; Martin Cooper designed the first handheld mobile phone based on the 1960s Star Trek communicator; and NASA astronaut Pam Melroy modeled her career on the adventures of Anne McCaffrey’s space-faring heroines. When it is not the source of new technologies or theories, SF provides us with a vocabulary to make sense of the world around us. Perhaps the most celebrated example of this is William Gibson’s “cyberspace,” a term coined in the 1982 short story “Burning Chrome” to describe the virtual worlds created by video games and the Arpanet and that is, today, synonymous with the Internet. While it is certainly possible to overstate the influence of SF on scientific and technological development, that influence is undeniably and persistently there. If you have any lingering doubts about this, we encourage you to point your web browser to <www.technovelgy.com>, a site showcasing over 2,000 “inventions, technologies, and ideas” found first in speculative literature from the 1600s to the present.

But why stop with gadgets or even ideas? May not the methods of scientific research and technological development be influenced or even changed by SF as well? In the late 1800s, British officers used future war stories about weaponized modes of transport called “tanks” to secure funding for military research and development. [End Page 1] A century later and a continent further west, SF authors associated with the American Citizen’s Advisory Council on National Space Policy helped the Reagan administration transition team prepare its space-policy papers. (Indeed, although he denies it vehemently, many people believe that council member Jerry Pournelle gave Reagan’s space defense initiative the infamous “Star Wars” moniker.)1 This tradition continues today with the Sigma Group, a consortium of SF authors who provide futurism consulting to governments and NGOs around the world. Such groups gain purchase in political circles because their members think about the relations of science and society in strange and startling ways not found in military colleges, corporate futurism, or positivist think tanks.

This leads to the question: If visionary SF authors can impact the way we implement science and envision future technologies, could not a gripping SF story inspire an improved science itself? This question should come as no surprise to readers of Configurations because it is one that has informed science studies for nearly three decades now. In our role as science studies scholars, we have long been intrigued by feminist theorists’ calls for a “successor science” that would account for the constructed nature of knowledge claims and knowing subjects and thus comprise a new mode of scientific practice that, as Donna Haraway imagines, “can be partially shared and friendly to earth-wide projects of finite freedom, adequate material abundance, modest meaning in suffering, and limited happiness.”2 Haraway’s elegant vision is one that, in our role as SF scholars, we cannot help but think already exists in the speculative literature we study. Haraway herself frequently cites SF writers as the most potent technocultural theorists of our times. As she noted in her acceptance comments for the 2011 Pilgrim Award (granted by the Science Fiction Research Association for lifetime achievements in SF research), science, like SF, is characterized by “knowledge-making and world-making.” Indeed, she goes on to propose that “the tight coupling of writing and research—where both terms require the factual, fictional, and fabulated; where both terms are materialized in fiction and in scholarship—seem to me built into science fiction’s techno-organic, polyglot, polymorphic wiring diagrams.”3 [End Page 2]

As science studies and SF scholars we desire to both explore and promote the interrelation of the factual, the fictional, and the fabulated. That desire has brought us to the thesis of this special issue: no other...

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