Editors: Piotr Gorliński-Kucik, Jerzy Stachowicz, Łukasz Kiełpiński

In recent years, there has been an increased interest in science fiction seen as an important artistic and pop-cultural practice worthy of renewed – or deeper – academic reflection. The reason for this is – in addition to the renaissance of SF in various media forms (cinema, comics, series, podcasts, games) and the growing importance of fan culture – a significant paradigm shift: the cancellation of the ‘end of history’ and its replacement by a perspective of ‘planetary catastrophe’, whether climate, political or social.

Science fiction is thus no longer treated as a marginal object of research interest, and its formal and thematic diversity has been increasingly seen as an inspiring field of interdisciplinary analysis. The imaginary futures produced in SF not only mirror the social trends and common perceptions accompanying the era, but also, as Richard Barbrook notes, participate in the delineation of future realities and in imagining where culture (not only technological) is headed. They also remain in constant relationship and tension on the axis of past-present-future.

In their book Make It So: Interaction Design Lessons from Science Fiction, Nathan Sherdoff and Christoper Noessel stated bluntly that ‘whether we like it or not’, it is the visions of technology experienced in SF images (television, cinema, comics, games, etc.) that set the audience's expectations of technology and interfaces yet to come. In the plethora of images and information, it is the visual cultures of SF, as Pawel Frelik calls them, that mark out a common field of cultural reference for broad social groups.

Science fiction is a practice that transcends genres and media, a tool for speculative thinking and the construction of imagined, but strongly connected contemporary worlds of a more than merely entertaining nature. As Frelik puts it, SF ‘allows us to look at the world in a perspective unattainable in any other cultural discourse’. Science fiction, in this perspective, is, as Grażyna Gajewska claims, ‘deconstructing culturally fixed ways of thinking about reality, speculating on alternative orders of organising interpersonal (in terms of gender, sexual orientation, ethnicity, social status) and interspecies relations, proclaiming a new (better, fairer, sustainable) reality’.

We are convinced that the critical potential of SF has still not been sufficiently exploited in the humanities. That is why we would like to encourage a reflection on the place and role of science fiction in visual culture with an explicit, though not exclusive, focus on the Polish perspective. What are science fiction images? Can we, and how can we, speak of any particular science fiction as a specific way of processing, producing and interpreting reality, directing the visual imagination along certain tracks (including neo-colonial, technoutopian, technofeudal) and hiding what does not fit into ‘science fiction’? How has our present been designed on past ideas of what will be, and what the world should look like? Are the currently observed transformations of capitalism an attempt to realise futures imagined before the digital age? What images and scenarios of planetary catastrophe do we find in science fiction? Finally: can we speak of a specifically Polish SF visual culture?

Suggested themes:

• Polish visual cultures of SF,
• SF as a non-genre: aesthetics, thinking, research method, artistic practice,
• multi-media and going beyond genres,
• SF as media archaeology,
• science fiction video games,
• socialist and capitalist utopias,
• techno-optimism,
• interfaces of the future,
• SF as media archaeology,
• images of the future in the past,
• SF as a way of looking at the present.

We are accepting abstracts (maximum A4 page) until February 1, 2025. Deadline for submission of the first version of the text: March 25, 2025. Should you have any questions, please contact us.

Before submitting, please consult our guidelines. When submitting the paper, please include: illustrations, author's bio, abstract (in Polish or English), key words and bibliography (Chicago Manual of Style). Please send all the above to the editor's email address: redakcja@pismowidok.org