If Darko Suvin, still the reference point for those wanting to study the subject, describes science fiction (SF) as a “mode of cognitive estrangement,” then the present volume engages, directly, indirectly, with that proposition.Footnote ¹ A few essays mention the difficult taxonomy of the genre, overrunning, hybrid, abject or also, as Rob Latham writes, “in the process of becoming pure vapor” (108), but a similar “impropriety” exists in relation to its politics. What is proper or improper, what belongs, what doesn't belong, exists, as Jacques Derrida has shown, at the heart of the question about genre.Footnote ² But as a form, SF's impropriety – beyond that which is proper to all genres – also concerns the exposure of a repressed impropriety that makes up the subject, the home, the nation-state, the market, the present, that which engenders “me,” engenders “us.” SF tends, as such, to be associated with possibilities, the Blochian principle of hope that Mark Bould mentions, for example, or altered states experienced through SF games, whose different spatialities or choreographies (a reference to Mark J. P. Wolf's description of the mechanics of gamingFootnote ³ ) allow for the emergence of transformations, deformations of contemporary culture, experienced as “historical present” (207).

This collection of essays provides a good starting point for investigations into alternative ways of being in the world explored through SF: Lisa Yaszek's study of “Afrofuturism in American Science Fiction” and Alexis Lothian's contribution on feminist and queer SF are cases in point, here, particularly because they encourage readings of less familiar texts that have previously been overshadowed by those that by now seem to produce only dull responses, the same arguments, gestures that are predictable in advance. Amongst these perhaps necessarily broad essays are outstanding chapters: David M. Higgins's work on SF after “9/11,” Roger Luckhurst's chapter on “American Weird,” the final piece titled “After America” by Rebekah C. Sheldon, all of which deliver compelling analyses that go way beyond survey or introduction.

I'd like to concentrate, briefly, if also through digressions, on Luckhurst's essay. Of all of those included here, it is the only one (though Priscilla Ward and Patrick Jagoda touch on the subject, too) to address a myth that falls a little short of study in a collection where the notion of the state forms the basis for an interrogation of the functioning, in/through “American” SF, of political borders but for which there still exists, as if “naturally,” the concept of the “human.” It is odd that what Sheldon calls “the experience of dispossession” (211) – an experience which very evidently recurs as a point of discussion throughout the book – doesn't extend to in- or nonhuman forms internal to “me,” those that, as Luckhurst argues, explode “human” integrity in the Lovecraftian weird (197). The “unrepresentable Thing” (198) at “my” core – the weird as “discovery of an unhuman limit to thought, that is nevertheless fundamental to thought” (Luckhurst cites Eugene Thacker's After Life (2010), thinking (the) weird (200)) – that's an unthinkable, unhuman thought that should also have been thought in relation to other forms of SF. What “unbounds the self” (201), after all, so frequently “takes place” – this taking place here is a process of dispossession, of losing ground – in the genre, improper as it is, yet as the “unbounding” relates to the “human,” it only emerges here and there in chapters outside Luckhurst's: a fragility that is latently present, repressed, as if the concept needed saving. Considering the scope of this collection, its rationale as a key resource for those interested in investigating SF, there should have been (it would have been im/proper to have) a chapter “reserved,” some space “saved,” to undo/unbound the “subject” as naturally or automatically “human,” especially when bearing in mind, say, Philip K. Dick's novels, Blade Runner (dir. Ridley Scott, 1982), David Cronenberg's films (though maybe those fall outside the remit of “American” SF?), etc., or also when thinking of Sherryl Vint's important work (not included here, though she contributed a chapter) on future bodies, on “the animal” in SF. The “experience of dispossession,” a “loss” that goes beyond the thinking of a “cognitive estrangement” (there's too much agency, still, in that), has to “take place” in relation to the “human” in a collection such as this one: “my” impropriety, surely, and referring to Giorgio Agamben's The Coming Community (1993), is a “taking-place” proper to SF.