Starboard Vineyard Tours

Mar 02 2025 19 ep. 46

Starboard Vineyard Tours Podcast artwork

Welcome to Starboard Vineyard Tours! Curious what people have thought and written about science fiction? Want some guidance on discovering this area of study - things to read, and ways to read them? In this podcast, Mark and Ben will take you on a tour through the world of science fiction studies. Join us on the beginning of a voyage into the unfamiliar, the estranging, the counterfactual, the speculative, what has not happened but might: science fiction, in all its forms. (And please remember to keep hands, feet, and any other limbs on board the vessel at all times!)

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Starboard Vineyard Tours 18: New Maps of Hell: A Survey of Science Fiction, Amis

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

Starboard Vineyard Tours 17: Miracle Stalker: Personal and Social Transformation in Arkady and Boris Strugatsky's Roadside Picnic, Moore

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

Starboard Vineyard Tours 16: Pilgrims Through Space and Time: Trends and Patterns in Scientific and Utopian Fiction, Bailey

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

Starboard Vineyard Tours 15: Cyberpunk's masculinist legacy: Puppetry, labour and ménage à trois in Blade Runner 2049, Murphy

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. M

Starboard Vineyard Tours 14: Shadows of the Empire/A New Hope: A Dialectical Critique of Gender Historicization and Utopian Desire in Isabel Fall's "Helicopter Story", Fulloon

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 surrou

Starboard Vineyard Tours 13: The Mechanics of Wonder: The Creation of the Idea of Science Fiction, Westfahl

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. Camp

Starboard Vineyard Tours 12: Toward a Science-Fictional Interpretational Method: Reading Three Borges Stories, O'Krent

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

Starboard Vineyard Tours 11: The Working Planetologist: Speculative Worlds and the Practice of Climate Science, Buse

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 discuss

Starboard Vineyard Tours 10: The World Is Born From Zero: Understanding Speculation and Video Games, Kunzelman

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

Starboard Vineyard Tours 9: Do Metaphors Dream of Literal Sleep?: A Science-Fictional Theory of Representation, Chu

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 s