Abstract:
It is widely understood that human self-images of time periods other than our own reveal much about contemporary values. Unearthing material from the archaeological zones of the present releases the deep genealogies just perceptible beneath the flux of lived time and, as such, reveals other worlds that have shaped our own. In this sense it is also clear that it is our own world and its history that provide pathways to the future, and to the otherworldly transfigurations made possible by science fiction. If this has been seen as an inevitable flaw of science fiction as a genre – insofar as the critique of the dominant ideology of the present can never be satisfactorily extended to a future that surpasses it1- it does not necessarily follow that the critique of the present, and past, cannot provide fertile speculative ground for what the future may become.
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