Beyond A New World in Space: Critical Astral Frontiers in Octavia Butler and Adam Garnet Jones

Abstract

This paper explores two contemporary literary visions of space settlement to gauge their potential within an emancipatory feminist and antiracist imaginary of the future. In doing so, it engages with the broader question of whether literary interplanetary dreams are necessarily tied up in a colonial rhetoric of violent expansion, or if they can also be organized to serve the interests of oppressed and underserved groups in an Anthropocene context. The text examines and compares two recent narratives of space settlement, the one found in Octavia Butler’s ‘Earthseed’ series and Adam Garnet Jones’ short story ‘History of the New World.’ Based on a comparative close reading of both, this paper argues that both stories frame the project of resettling in space as a hopeful alternative to life within a collapsed natural world and the precarious socio-political framework that has arisen from it, albeit with distinctly different outcomes. This comparison focuses specifically on the organization of such utopian extraplanetary societies and the roles they fulfill in the present. Crucially, this paper considers how both stories evaluate the possibility of choosing not to leave for the astral frontier.