Tag: sustainability

Issue 301, ‘The Future of Food’—Call for proposals

Alien (1979), Dir. Ridley Scott 


From Soylent Green to Slusho!, Okja to Isserley, food is an often central, if not always visible, aspect of SF/F world-building. How human societies feed themselves characterises futures as dystopian or utopian as scarce or abundant, as just or exploitative – imbricating issues of climate change, bioethics, animal rights and the rights of nature, systems of labor and resource distribution. While food and food webs are often associated with structural violence in SF/F, the genre also provides examples of ‘model’ futures through feminist utopias such Woman on the Edge of Time, technological imaginaries such as Star Trek’s replicators, and the various agricultural and societal revolutions posited by an entire genre: solarpunk. 

For its 301st issue, the Vector editorial team is seeking contributions that explore the multifaceted and nuanced ways that speculative genres imagine the future of food. As we try to implement technologies that enable us to make food out of air,1 plastic,2 or, more prosaically, algae, as we 3-D print steaks or make ‘beef rice’3 (without a single cow), what role does science fiction play in shaping attitudes or conversations around such technologies? When we try to figure out how to provide for a growing global population in the face of the climate crisis and biodiversity loss (largely driven by agriculture), should we turn to science fiction for help with reimagining food cultures?

Suggested questions / topics
Food products of the future   
Synthetic, lab-grown meat 
Animal farming and ethics 
Terraforming for agriculture 
Growing food in space 
Eating practices 
The human body 
Health 
Slaughtering practices  
Imagining post-scarcity futures
Eating others 

Please submit your proposal by Dec 14, 2024 to vector.submissions@gmail.com, including:


A 150-500 word proposal, including estimated length;
Something about yourself, either a 50-100 word bio or a CV.

Articles should be between 1,000 and 8,000 words. Please let us know your estimated word count. We seek articles that are carefully grounded in scholarly research, while also being clear, engaging, and suitable for a broad audience (including non-academics). Articles will be due by March 30th, 2025.  

Please also feel free to make queries about other formats, e.g. reviews, interviews, curated reading lists, roundtable discussions, unusual / innovative formats. 

  1.  https://www.esa.int/Applications/Technology_Transfer/Food_out_of_the_thin_air
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  2. https://www.mtu.edu/magazine/research/2022/stories/plastic-trash-protein/ ↩︎
  3. https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2024/feb/14/lab-grown-beef-rice-could-offer-more-sustainable-protein-source-say-creators
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Vector #130

Vector #130Download

As writers we have the ability to create perfection, however: which may be another good reason for writing science fiction. From the biological standpoint we have a choice of two kinds of perfection: expanding or stable. The expanding kind postulates a dominant race, usually human, colonizing an ever-increasing number of worlds. There can be no end to the process of expansion because, like economic growth rates and the Roman Empire, the only alternative is collapse. Conflict is provided by the opposition of other races and such stories tend to be technological in content. An undeniable attraction lies in the headlong progression towards a vast Unknown, but the drawback is an uncomfortable similarity to our present situation on Earth.

I chose the second alternative for my recent novels because of its inherent optimism: it is theoretically possible to reach and sustain a stable perfection. The end product is a planet which a perfect ecology with a diversity of plants and animals dovetailing into a balanced whole. Conflict is provided by the arising of an occasional imbalance, either internally or externally inflicted. There is little room for technology in this kind of story because it would eventually be defeated by the finite nature of global resources, despite recycling and solar power. British SF often uses this introspective approach, although not always stating openly that life will go on after the difficult period that it often describes. Perhaps here there is an over-preoccupation with human life. The fact that the story is set at a point well before ecological stability is achieved sometimes brands it as ‘pessimistic’ in American eyes. This rather shortsighted view ignores the optimism inherent in the struggle for a stable perfection – as well as the practical impossibility of achieving an expanding perfection.

Michael Coney