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- Convenors:
-
Christina Lord
(University of North Carolina Wilmington)
Francesca Arnavas (University of Tartu)
Sang-Keun Yoo (Marist University)
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Short Abstract
This panel explores how speculative fiction reimagines myth and cultural cosmologies to challenge dominant epistemologies. Through mermaids, aliens, and cyborgs, the papers examine posthuman pasts and futures shaped by environmental collapse, Indigenous knowledge, and feminist critique.
Long Abstract
This panel explores how contemporary speculative narratives engage with myth, cultural cosmologies, and posthumanism to challenge dominant epistemologies and reimagine the boundaries of the human. From the depths of the ocean to the far reaches of space, the papers examine how hybrid and/or nonhuman figures—mermaids, cyborgs, aliens—serve as cultural signifiers of transformation, resistance, and alternative knowledge systems.
Sang-Keun Yoo analyzes Larissa Lai’s "Salt Fish Girl" (2002), arguing that the novel’s concept of “transfuturism” draws on Chinese myth, particularly the Nu Wa cosmology, to envision a posthuman future that resists transhumanist and Orientalist paradigms. Christina Lord examines the French television series "OVNI(s)" (2021–2022), which satirizes Western scientific rationalism through genre hybridity and the Enlightenment-era "conte philosophique," while foregrounding Indigenous cosmologies as valid frameworks for understanding the unknown. Francesca Arnavas turns to Laura Pugno’s Italian novel "Sirene" (2007), a dark fairy tale in which the mermaid becomes a figure of ecological collapse and posthuman possibility, challenging anthropocentric ethics through watery, feminist lenses.
Together, these papers demonstrate how speculative fiction reactivates myth and folklore to critique colonial, hyper-rationalist, and misogynist worldviews. By foregrounding non-Western and nonhuman perspectives, the panel invites reflection on how narrative can unsettle fixed categories of nature, knowledge, and identity—and how mythic imaginaries can illuminate paths toward more pluralistic and ecologically attuned futures.
Accepted papers
Session 1 Sunday 14 June, 2026, -Paper short abstract
This paper examines Salt Fish Girl’s transfuturism, where Chinese myth and posthumanism merge to envision a radically transformed humanity. Lai rewrites the Nu Wa myth, critiques colonialism and Orientalism, and reimagines the future through mythic narratives rather than technological progress.
Paper long abstract
This paper examines transfuturism in Asian Canadian writer Larissa Lai's 2002 novel Salt Fish Girl, defining it as a vision of the future with a radically transformed reality and concept of the human. The chapter argues that this novel emphasizes the importance of Chinese myth in posthuman thinking, challenging the notion that myth and posthumanism are incompatible. Lai demonstrates how myths can be rewritten and parodied, as seen in her adaptation of the Nu Wa cosmology, which serves as a counterpoint to European myths and Christian cosmology.
Salt Fish Girl skillfully blends science fiction and myth to critique dystopian futures shaped by corporate colonialism, racism, and transhumanist ideals. It also parodies Anglophone science fiction works like Frankenstein and Blade Runner, challenging their Orientalist depictions of Asian characters. Through this approach, Lai offers a unique perspective on how transfuturism can be achieved through the mythic reconceptualization of posthumanism, rather than through transhumanist technological advancement. By analyzing Lai’s novel, this chapter explores an alternative vision of the future that demonstrates how traditional narratives can be repurposed to imagine new understandings of humanity.
Paper short abstract
This paper analyzes the French television show "OVNI(s)" ["UFO(s)"] as a satirical critique of Western scientific rationalism. Through genre hybridity and engagement with the "conte philosophique", the series foregrounds Indigenous cosmologies and challenges Western conceptualizations of nature.
Paper long abstract
Set in 1978 France, the television series "OVNI(s)" [UFO(s)] (2021–2022, Canal+) draws inspiration from the real-life Groupe d’étude sur les phénomènes aérospatiaux non-identifiés (GEPAN), a division of the French space agency CNES tasked with investigating UFO phenomena. The series follows astrophysicist Didier Mathure, whose failed rocket launch leads to his reluctant reassignment to GEPAN. Initially dismissive of the bureau’s mission, Didier is gradually transformed through his encounters with a team of unconventional investigators and the inexplicable phenomena they study.
This paper examines OVNI(s) as a novel contribution to French speculative fiction, particularly through its hybridization of genres—workplace comedy, science fiction, and detective narrative—within a 30-minute episodic format. The series critiques Western scientific rationalism through the figure of Didier, a modern-day Cartesian whose rigid worldview is challenged by events that defy empirical explanation. Drawing on the Enlightenment-era conte philosophique, the show satirizes Didier’s epistemological arrogance, positioning him as both anti-hero and object of critique.
OVNI(s) reimagines the conte philosophique for the 21st century by exposing the limitations of Western science in accounting for non-Western and Indigenous cosmologies. In doing so, it subverts the traditional “first contact” narrative in science fiction, suggesting instead that knowledge of the stars—and of alien life—has long existed outside dominant scientific paradigms. By linking UFO phenomena to Indigenous knowledge systems, the series invites viewers to reconsider the boundaries between the natural and supernatural, and to recognize the plurality of ways in which the world can be known.
Paper short abstract
This paper explores Italian novel Sirene by Laura Pugno, where the mermaid becomes a hybrid figure of dystopia, climate catastrophe, and posthuman possibility. Drawing on myth, manga, and dark fairy tale, the novel critiques anthropocentrism and reimagines humanity through watery, feminist lenses.
Paper long abstract
Mermaids are hybrid creatures around whom a rich lore has proliferated for centuries. On one side, we find pretty, Disneyfied, commercialized versions—The Little Mermaid, Splash—and on the other, the darker, more mysterious mermaids of Homer’s Odyssey or Guillermo del Toro’s The Shape of Water. In this latter tradition, mermaids embody essential human ambiguity (Easterlin), drawing us into realms of uncertainty and uncanniness.
I would like to focus on one of these darker fictional appearances: Sirene, a contemporary speculative novel by Italian author Laura Pugno. In Sirene, the mermaid becomes a disturbing figure within a dystopian, climate-ravaged world. The novel reads like a dark fairy tale, drawing from Greek mythology and Japanese manga, where the mermaid is entangled in a post-apocalyptic scenario marked by disease, exploitation, and cannibalism.
Yet the mermaid is not only a symbol of catastrophe. Through her hybridity and liminality, she becomes a cultural signifier of environmental transformation and posthuman possibility. Pugno uses the mermaid to explore our relationship with water, the ethics of survival, and the deconstruction of anthropocentric and earth-centric worldviews. The novel also engages feminist and political concerns, using the mermaid’s watery essence to unsettle stable categories of identity and ethics. In Sirene, the mermaid leads us into an uncomfortable but necessary reflection on the darkest sides of humanity and the potential for myth to illuminate speculative futures shaped by ecological collapse and posthuman reimaginings.
Paper short abstract
This paper explores representation of folk-nature relations as portrayed in the Ghorman story in the tv show Star Wars: Andor. The paper will explore the introduction of the Ghor people and their relationship with their planet’s ecology, and how Empire then intervenes and disrupts these relations.
Paper long abstract
Star Wars as a franchise has long been a text which critiques empire, using references to the SS to critique the war in Vietnam, and labelling the US as an imperial power which should be critiqued in a similar way to the Nazi regime.
In this paper, I will explore the relations of the people of Ghorman in Star Wars: Andor (2022-2025) with their nature, particularly the spiders, which are their most significant natural resource. The showrunner Tony Gilroy spoke in interviews about the importance of the Ghor being insular for the imperial propaganda machine to be effective (Decider); I will explore how the image of the spider also contributes to this representation, through the lens of the abject as defined by Julia Kristeva as “what disturbs identity, system, order” (Kristeva), as well as post-colonial theory (Said), and as a representation of imperial ecological destruction, driven by colonial asset stripping as described by Huggan and Tiffin in ‘Postcolonial Ecocentrism’. The paper will also look at other examples of relations to nature in Star Wars, such as the Forest Moon of Endor in the plot of Return of the Jedi (1983), and its role as both a site of resistance and one of imperial settlement.
It is significant that in Girloy’s series we hear a senator speaking to an already coerced senate the word genocide. The 1970’s films critiqued Vietnam, what can contemporary science fiction tell us about contemporary wars, and what are the spiders used to make us complicit?
Paper short abstract
This paper analyses the blurring of the human/non-human boundary through the centrality of familiar-like mashavi in Lauren Beukes’ Zoo City and the extent to which this leads to a mode of post-anthropocentric storytelling.
Paper long abstract
The paper examines the significance of mashavi (familiar-like animals) in Lauren Beukes’ Zoo City (2011), a novel set in an alternate Johannesburg shaped by Shona cosmology and mythology. In this world, human and non-human lives are inextricably linked – socially, ethically, and materially – as those who commit murder gain mashavi. I argue that mashavi evoke key ecocritical concepts such as enmeshment (Morton 2010) and/or polycrisis (Morin and Kern 1999). Situating the narrative within the context of interconnected crises, socio-political, historical and ecological alike, this paper introduces what I am calling the ‘sloth effect’, i.e., the narratological effects of incorporating the protagonist’s shavi (Sloth) into the structure of the novel. This paper engages with three central questions: 1) how does the inclusion of mashavi question (and subsequently redefine) what it means to be human?; 2) to what extent does the novel’s blurring of the human-non-human boundaries lead to a post-anthropocentric mode of storytelling?; 3) do mashavi function simply as an allegorical device to explore contemporary concerns that affect South Africans, including xenophobia, racism, and the ongoing effects of apartheid? The ‘sloth effect’ is emblematic of a reconfigured post-human identity, one that destabilises binaries between the material and spiritual, the human and the animal. Through its hybrid narrative and speculative world-building, Zoo City gestures towards new ecologies of identity, responsibility, and relationship in the face of interconnected crises.