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Review: Gross Ideas: Tales of Tomorrow’s Architecture

Edwina Attlee, Maria Smith, and Phineas Harper, eds.  Gross Ideas: Tales of Tomorrow’s Architecture (London: The Architecture Foundation and Oslo Architecture Triennale, 2019)

Reviewed by Carl Abbott

Cover of Gross Ideas: Tales of Tomorrow's Architecture. Stairs and columns against a backdrop of mountains, under a huge sun or moon, everything soaked in bloody light

To understand Gross Ideas, start with the Oslo Architecture Triennale to which this book is a companion. The Triennale is “a member organization that unites the major architecture and urban planning networks in Norway” for conversations and public programs about the role of architecture in society. Participants and supporters include national associations of design professionals, architecture schools, Norwegian government agencies, and international architecture firms with Norwegian roots. The 2019 Triennale in the fall of 2019, was the seventh iteration.

Some of the contributors identify as writers and some as architects, and a few work both sides. There are two poems, one graphic narrative, and fourteen prose narratives of widely differing character …

The book itself is a miscellany of contributions that is more a curated exhibit in verbal form than a tightly edited collection, a characterization that I suspect the curator-editors would find quite acceptable. Some of the contributors identify as writers and some as architects, and a few work both sides. There are two poems, one graphic narrative, and fourteen prose narratives of widely differing character. Some of these latter are stories that could easily find homes in science fiction magazines. Others range from Will Self’s takeoff on Invisible Cities to Lesley Lokko’s essay on women and transnational remittances that includes a fictional vignette, a short factual summary, and scholarly endnotes (it is quite effective). 

Architects have long delighted to imagine grand buildings and building schemes—Arturo Soria y Mata’s Ciudad Lineal, the arcologies of Paolo Soleri, Walking City and other thought experiments of the Archigram group, a linear supercity from Michael Graves, the mile-high skyscraper of Frank Lloyd Wright (even Burj Khalifa gets only halfway there). Science fiction has appropriated the taste for the grandiose from Trantor and Coruscant to countless artists’ depictions of imagined urban futures full of soaring towers in shimmering color. 

What naïve readers might expect from the “architecture” in the subtitle is often absent …

There is no such here. What naïve readers might expect from the “architecture” in the subtitle is often absent. Instead we get one story in which the largest building is a village house (Sophie Mackintosh, “Placation”), a second set in a caricature of a dusty, unchanging town of the old American Southwest (Joel Blackledge, “Fountainwood”), and another in derelict and abandoned Edinburgh (Camilla Grudova, “Deliberate Ruins’). The only story to center a single building uses an unfinished and abandoned Persian Gulf skyscraper (Deepak Unnikrishnan, “Cat”). The other entry in which architecture is the explicit focus is the graphic narrative “Exile’s Letter” by Mill + Jones, which chronicles efforts to build in a low-technology future (temple, town, giant fishing pier) that are laid low by fire and flood and end with the triumph of unbuilding in a sort of Nature-driven  version of the Tower of Babel. 

Some of the entries posit future engineering rather than architecture—a distinction that the curators and the Triennale folks would likely disregard anyway. For example, Robin Nicholson projects the green retrofitting of London in 2039. I had the most fun with “The Aqueduct,” which presents a scenario for replacing Britain’s rail and road transportation with a set of canals. It is a fascinating think-piece that painlessly introduces elementary physics to extrapolate from Britain’s current restored canals. If he hasn’t, author Steve Webb should look up Railroads and American Economic Growth by my old graduate professor Robert Fogel, which includes a long counterfactual to test whether the United States might have had the same robust economic growth had it invested in canals and river improvements rather than railroads in the nineteenth century.  

As she starts work and experiments on her own small house, she finds herself slowly absorbed by the microbes …

The contributors took to heart the theme of the 2019 Triennale—“Enough: The Architecture of Degrowth.” Some stories imagine the built world in decay (Grudova, Unnikrishnan), others the natural world actively triumphant (Mackintosh).  Lev Bratishenko, “You Wanted This,” reports a future United Nations conference at which national representatives offer their own favored ways to drastically reduce the world population—the Russians want to use thermonuclear bombs, the Japanese want to weaponize the Internet of Things, the Americans want to drug everyone to euphoric death (cue up Serenity). One of the most powerful stories is Rachel Armstrong’s “Bittersweet Building.” A new architecture graduate in desperate need of a job catches on with a Norwegian firm that is trying to incorporate bacteria as part of a building’s metabolism (waste into clean water, heat, oxygen). As she starts work and experiments on her own small house, she finds herself slowly absorbed by the microbes into their own complex world and finally merging fully into the “metabolic community of the landscape.” It is both a chilling and a comforting variation on the natural process of bodily decay. For the theme of degrowth, score a big one for the Earth.

Having considered the “architecture” half of “tales of tomorrow’s architecture,” what about the “tales” part? To no surprise, the pieces run a wide span from interesting but undramatic speculation to engaging story. For an example from the didactic side, Edward Davey, “Oli Away,” uses the mechanism of a report on a gap year journey to explicate some favored energy and transportation options. The entries by Nicholson, Bratishenko, and Webb are additional examples of scenario-building rather than storytelling. They have a lot of information without much surrounding story, which is not to say that we should not think about the ideas they present. After all, nobody read Looking Backward for its compelling characters and plot, but it had enormous influence. 

Several of the contributions that are strong as stories are, not surprisingly, by people with lots of writing experience who know how to create engaging characters. For many Vector readers, the biggest name in the collection is Cory Dotorow, who contributes an interesting variation on his Disneyland obsession with “Materiality.”  He posits a theme park in which high school classes spend a week inhabiting reconstructed towns from different eras. Think Main Street USA meets the living displays of colonial “savages” found at early twentieth century world’s fairs (also see the living diorama in Colson Whitehead’s fantastic alternative view of American history in The Underground Railroad). The theme park contrasts with a present in which recycling and three-dimensional printed make the objects of everyday life ephemeral if not immaterial. Doctorow’s teenaged protagonist indirectly confronts the lasting imprint that seriously stupid Old Timey People left on the landscape by considering whether his favorite old tee shirt is still cool (it is). 

… architecture as a practice of designing individual buildings should be and is being swallowed up by the all-consuming impacts of climate change and necessary transformations in global energy systems.

Maria Smith in “Lay Low” uses the familiar frame of singles gossiping in a bar to introduce a society of scarcity in which everyone has monetized allowances for necessities like water, food, and electricity.  Her variation on a familiar science fiction future is a new way to get ahead on your budget—perhaps—by going into hibernation for a few months to lower your consumption levels and build up points. The women in the bar, who are just learning about the new option, don’t think that monetizing unconsciousness is going to go well.

Jo Lindsay Walton contributed the longest, most complex, and perhaps most readable story (no, there was collusion with your book review editor).  “In Arms” is cleverly constructed with two parallel threads—a woman waiting for a date to show up and an ecoterrorist launching an operation—that slowly grow more complex and intertwine in unexpected ways. Radical changes in building styles are slipped in as background, including the cool idea that rising seas have forced the seat of British government to shift to a mobile seastead platform nicknamed Wetminster.  

Without the subtitle and the wraparound material describing the Triennale, someone who casually reads through Gross Ideas would think it is about economic transition and “degrowth” in general, with architecture one of many avenues of exploration. The overall message is that architecture as a practice of designing individual buildings should be and is being swallowed up by the all-consuming impacts of climate change and necessary transformations in global energy systems. Some contributors see a complete devolution to a nonindustrial future, others a society of scarcity, and still others an adapting world. Tomorrow’s architecture, the book suggests, will be valuable to the extent that it is subordinated not just to social needs—an architectural truism, if not always heeded—but rather to fundamental institutional and social transformation. 

Carl Abbott is author of The Metropolitan Frontier: Cities in the Modern American West, The New Urban America: Growth and Politics in Sunbelt Cities, and Political Terrain: Washington, D.C., from Tidewater Town to Global Metropolis.

AGM 2020 Agenda Item: Diversity and Anti-Racism at the BSFA

The following text was written for the 2020 BSFA AGM, held online on 23 August on our Discord server.

Preamble

Jo Lindsay Walton

This is an agenda item about two closely connected matters, the recent and ongoing Black Lives Matter protests, and issues of diversity in the BSFA and UK SFF publishing and fandom more widely. We would like to invite the membership to consider some of the practical steps the BSFA might take. The BSFA is, of course, committed to anti-racism, and in recent months we’ve tried to play our part, for example recently publishing statements of solidarity with BLM in Vector and in the BSFA newsletter. With such statements, we join innumerable other cultural, arts, and community organisations and institutions. Gestures like these do often get a mixed reception from people doing anti-racist work. On the one hand, such gestures are usually both well-intentioned and broadly welcomed. On the other, many anti-racism activists point out that it’s easy to make statements of support, but that these may often be at best hollow, and at worst hypocritical! — contradicted by the actual policies and practices of the institutions in question.

Science fiction has a special connection to the future and, we’d like to think, a special connection to hopeful transformation. We believe it behooves us to ensure that our words are not hollow, but backed up by action. But what actions should those be? One area of focus can be our own SFF communities, fan, academic, and professional. Clarke Award judge Stewart Hotston recently published an article online which pointed out that, of 121 publisher submissions to the award, the total number by British authors of non-white descent was only three. Even more recently, several of this year’s Hugo Award nominees published a letter raising, among other issues, a lack of diversity in the panelling at this year’s virtual WorldCon. More broadly, I’m sure it escapes nobody’s notice that SFF cons in the UK are often very white spaces.

BSFA officers have been thinking about these issues for at least as long as we’ve been editing Vector, and no doubt much much longer, and we’ll continue to do so. Editorially we’ll continue to monitor which authors and books get coverage, and also continue to think about the diversity of our contributors. We’ll continue to be vigilant against racist discourse in our more open public spaces such as the BSFA Facebook page, and try always to ensure that these are spaces where BAME fans can feel respected and safe. And we’ll also try to make sure that there’s regular information shared in such spaces about the work of diversifying and decolonising SFF. In the medium to long term, the BSFA Committee (soon to be Council and Directors, following adoption of the new Constitution) is seriously lacking in diversity, and that needs to be addressed too.

What we would like to do now is suggest a few other possible actions the BSFA might take, and then open things up for a brief initial discussion. Please also consider this an opportunity to canvas who’s interested in actually getting involved in making some of these things happen. We’ll then formally propose some motions one by one.

Diversity and antiracism motions

Jo Lindsay Walton,  Polina Levontin, Dev Agarwal, Sue Oke

The editors of Vector, Focus and The BSFA Review with the support of the Chair and the Treasurer are proposing five motions. These motions are flexibly worded, since many of the details would need to be sorted out post the AGM. However, here’s a little more detail, albeit provisional: 

(1) Offer support-in-kind to BAME fans of science fiction. This would likely include a waiver on BSFA membership fees within the UK for as long as this is sustainable and necessary. We would also seek to reach out to other organisations, e.g. the British Fantasy Society, to potentially put together a package. 

(2) Offer financial support to BAME convention goers. This could for example follow the precedent of Con or Bust, and be offered from a special pot, generated from dedicated fundraising activities. 

(3) Pursue consultation with BAME members of the wider SFF community. The consultation would likely be an online anonymised initiative, with questions around the experience and priorities of BAME fans of science fiction, writers, academics and publishers. 

(4) Create a role of a Diversity Officer to support these efforts. The role would involve championing diversity of all kinds within the BSFA, as well as helping to administer specific initiatives or events (including, if passed, the motions presented here). It would not involve any additional powers requiring constitutional amendments. 

(5) Finally, we suggest that the BSFA make a donation to Black Lives Matter UK. 

Motions (1)-(4) were passed by the membership. Motion (5) was amended to “We resolve to make a donation to one or more appropriate anti-racist organisation(s). Preference will be given to a UK-based anti-racist charity associated with SF, if one can be identified,” and was then passed by the membership. Dave Lally also made a personal starting pledge to raise funds for these activities.

Freeing art from the human artist: Hod Lipson speaks to Fiona Moore about AI and creativity

Interview with Hod Lipson

By Fiona Moore

Artist: Pix18, a robot ‘that conceives and creates art on its very own.’ Oil on Canvas. (Image source: http://www.pix18.com)

Hod Lipson is a professor of Engineering and Data Science at Columbia University in New York. With Melba Kurman he is co-author the award-winning Fabricated: The New World of 3D printing and Driverless: Intelligent cars and the road ahead. His often provocative work on self-aware and self-replicating robots has been influential across academia, industry, policy, and public discourse more generally (including this very popular TED talk), and his interests also encompass pioneering in the fields of open-source 3D printing, electronics 3D printing, bio-printing and food printing. Hod directs the Creative Machines Lab at Columbia, where they “build robots that do what you’d least expect robots to do.”

Fiona Moore is a writer and academic whose work, mostly involving self-driving cars and intelligent technology, has appeared in Clarkesworld, Asimov’s, Interzone and many other publications, with reprints in Forever Magazine and two consecutive editions of The Best of British SF. Her story “Jolene” was shortlisted for the 2019 BSFA Award for Shorter Fiction. Her publications include one novel, Driving Ambition, numerous articles and guidebooks on cult television, guidebooks to Blake’s Seven, The Prisoner, Battlestar Galactica and Doctor Who, three stage plays and four audio plays. When not writing, she is a Professor of Business Anthropology at Royal Holloway, University of London.

You are a celebrated figure in the world of artificial intelligence research. Can you tell me how you came to be interested in, and working in, this area?

Thanks. To me, issues like self-awareness, creativity, and sentience are the essence of being human, and understanding them is one of life’s big mysteries – on par with questions like the origin of life and of the universe. There are also many practical reasons to understand and replicate such abilities (like making autonomous machines more resilient to failure). I think that we roboticists are perhaps not unlike ancient alchemists, trying to breathe life into matter. That’s what brings me to this challenge.

My own interest in AI is, in part, as an anthropologist, looking at culture. To what extent will AI “learn” culture, at least initially, from humans, and to what extent do you see them as capable of developing culture on their own?

Yes, AIs learn culture (for better and worse) from humans and from a human-controlled world; but as AIs become more autonomous, they will gather their own data, and develop their own norms, perspectives, and biases.

Do you see this already happening? If so, what do AI cultures look like at present?

AIs today are still like children, and their cultures are heavily controlled by us humans– their “parents.” For example, AIs that generate music are influenced by existing human music genres; AI’s that generate human portraits are influenced by images of humans they find on the web – disproportionately favouring certain aesthetics, genders, and ethnicities, etc. AIs that generate text are influenced by prose that they are trained on, and so forth.

I have not seen AIs that have full autonomy on the data they consume, but this will eventually happen as artificial intelligence becomes more physically autonomous and can collect its own data. But again, we humans are also increasingly subjected to an information diet that is prescribed by the culture we live in, and we have to make a conscious effort to rise above our culture or go against it. 

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Cargo (Arati Kadav 2019 Hindi) reviewed by Abhishek Lakkad

Cargo (Arati Kadav 2019 Hindi): A meandering rumination about the weightlessness of human existence

Reviewed by Abhishek Lakkad

Please note that this review contains spoilers.

Death can be understood as a scientific/biological phenomenon, but its gravity is experienced as a spiritual phenomenon. Both the scientific and the spiritual perspectives allow one to contemplate death. But when the makers of Cargo (2019) choose science as merely a veil for religious/spiritual ideas in order to comment on alienation and abandonment rampant in contemporary societies, they could have made sure that the film is passionate (or at least compassionate) enough to sustain its slow-paced narrative. Cargo (now available on Netflix) is the first feature length film of Arati Kadav, although she has written and directed several science fiction shorts in the last decade. Cargo highlights the theme of ‘loneliness’ in these times of pervasive social media that creates the impression that one is always connected and hence never alone. Hindu spiritual/religious ideas about karma and the cycle of life, death and rebirth are central to the narrative. The action mostly takes place on a spaceship orbiting Earth where human-like demons called rakshasas are essentially technicians enabling the transition from death to rebirth in a mundane, technocratic and institutionalised process — reminiscent of an airport security checkpoint, medical lab or a prison admissions office. The film terms this process as “post-death transition”, supervised by a department called Post-Death Transition Services (PDTS) that operates under the aegis of Inter-Planetary Space Organisation (IPSO) that has been established by the rakshasas. Owing to the film’s stance of deriving its fictional futuristic technology from elements of Hindu spirituality and mythology, the film has a distinct retro-futuristic feel. Perhaps the datedness of the film’s visual effects is meant to reinforce the 80s inspired aesthetics. 

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Fragmented dwellings: ontology and architecture in The City and the City (2009) and Learning the World (2005)

By Alexei Warshawski.

In this academic article, Alexei Warshawski explores themes of architecture, fragmentation, and ontology (in the sense of existence or Being as such) in two speculative fiction novels, China Miéville’s The City and the City (2009) and Ken MacLeod’s Learning the World (2005). MacLeod’s and Miéville’s engagement with postmodernism, read alongside Heidegger, reveal that no matter how fragmented our architecture, and whether we do or don’t truly dwell, our ontology is greatly contingent on the architecture which surrounds us, and our ability to exist within and alongside architectural constructs is an undeniably and increasingly precarious one.

The relationship between architecture and its inhabitants is a powerful one which can be liberating or repressive, inclusive or exclusive, reflective or reductive. These relations are neither cohesive with one another, nor mutually exclusive, so they problematise our relationship with architecture in spatial, temporal and ontological terms. Examples may be found in China Miéville’s The City and the City (2009) and Ken MacLeod’s Learning the World (2005). Miéville’s The City and the City follows Inspector Tyador Borlú as he investigates the murder of a foreign student whose body is found in Besźel, a city which is topographically twinned with another city called Ul Qoma. These two cities are on the same physical site and their residents are expected to ignore the city which they don’t live in, ‘unseeing’ any elements that they accidentally notice. Ken MacLeod’s Learning the World follows a future human race’s attempts to find a new planet to colonise as they travel on their planet-sized generation ship, and grapples with the problems they face in understanding a temporary architectural construct as a seemingly permanent and homely environment. Both novels engage with one of postmodernism’s key architectural concerns – the question of fragmentation, which this paper will argue is a necessity in sustaining the architecture of the worlds of both texts. While The City and the City explores fragmentary architecture through its twinned cities, Learning the World presents architecture as an inherently fragmentary construct, both in spatial and temporal terms. This paper will suggest that the ‘necessary fragmentation’ of the architecture in these texts proves the untenability of postmodern, neoliberal architecture as something permanent or fixed, in both spatial and temporal terms. Furthermore, this paper will argue that the idea of necessary fragmentation in this context give credence to Martin Heidegger’s understanding of ‘building’ and ‘dwelling’, a distinction he outlines in ‘Building, Dwelling, Thinking’ (1951) which suggests that ‘dwelling’ as an ontological condition is not a guaranteed effect of building or settling within architectural constructs, and that the ability to ‘build’ in an ontologically authentic manner requires one to possess the capacity to ‘dwell’ in the first place. This paper will outline how these paired concepts of building and dwelling can affect the formation and occupation of architecture, as well as architecture’s relationship to nature. Drawing together the fragmentary elements of architecture and their relationship to Heidegger’s thinking in both texts, this paper will conclude with an analysis of the reflective properties of architecture – in both literal and metaphoric senses – to demonstrate the extent to which architecture can affect not just our social and domestic lives, but our ontology itself.

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Samuel R. Delany’s Dhalgren: Mapping economic landscapes in science fiction

By Josephine Wideman.

In this academic article, Josephine Wideman explores themes of temporality and capital accumulation in Samuel R. Delany’s Dhalgren (1975). As Fredric Jameson suggests, we must find new methods of spatial and social mapping in order to navigate the geographical and cultural landscapes of late capitalism. Delany’s Dhalgren is deeply concerned with the fate of US hegemony, and with the uncertainty that capitalism has produced: the duality of its unsustainability and seeming inevitability. Bellona is a cityscape which has been devastated by the cycle of accumulation and taken off the map. Delany’s creation ultimately should not be read as a prophecy of what will come of late US capitalism, but it gives insight into the complex historical and apocalyptic consciousness that has been cultivated.

Dhalgren by Samuel R. Delany

Samuel R. Delany’s 1975 novel Dhalgren is lengthy, hallucinatory, and at times unnavigable science fiction. Its form is as dense and as wavering as the urban landscape it depicts, where Delany’s protagonist, Kid, can wonder whether ‘there isn’t a chasm in front of me I’ve hallucinated into plain concrete.’1 Bellona – the fictional city where events take place – is a space ‘fixed in the layered landscape, red, brass, and blue, but […] distorted as distance itself,’ a place where ‘the real’ is ‘all masked by pale diffraction.’2 Although the scenery and scenarios of Bellona may be fictional, and perhaps even fantastic, they are also true representations of real experience. The unfixed landscape we live in becomes ‘fixed’ before us in Delany’s book. The distortions and diffractions by which it is fictionalised only increase its representational precision. The gaps in our experience, usually masked, are made visible. For although it takes an unusual form, we can recognise

this timeless city […] this spaceless preserve where any slippage can occur, these closing walls, laced with fire-escapes, gates, and crenellations are too unfixed to hold it in so that, from me as a moving node, it seems to spread, by flood and seepage, over the whole uneasy scape.3

In looking at Dhalgren, I have borrowed from the political theorist and sociologist Giovanni Arrighi in order to trace the presence and effects of capitalist accumulation in Delany’s fiction. Arrighi, in The Long Twentieth Century, describes the ‘interpretative scheme’ of capitalism as a ‘recurrent phenomena.’4 Drawing on work by the historian Fernand Braudel, Arrighi follows the Genoese, the Dutch, and the British cycles of accumulation to the current North American cycle. By examining past economic patterns and anomalies, he suggests that we may be able to gesture at the fate of our current cycle. Arrighi sets out to demonstrate that the rise and fall of these hegemonies, while never identical, tend to follow a set of stages that begin ‘to look familiar.’5 To make his argument, he proposes a new use for Marx’s ‘general formula of capital’:

Marx’s general formula of capital (MCM’) can therefore be interpreted as depicting not just the logic of individual capitalist investments, but also a recurrent pattern of historical capitalism as world system. The central aspect of this pattern is the alternation of epochs of material expansion (MC phases of capital accumulation) with phases of financial rebirth and expansion (CM’ phases).6

In Das Kapital, Marx initially proposes the formula CMC to theorise how capital functions. This theory begins with the assumption that people have needs and desires they can’t satisfy by themselves. Thus we create the commodities we know how to make (C), which are sold for money (M), which allows us to buy the commodities we want (C). As this cycle repeats, those who are skilled presumably accrue more value than others, being able to sell their commodities for a greater profit. This theory centres around the individual and his role in a capitalist system. But Marx then sets CMC aside in favour of another formula – the formula borrowed by Arrighi in The Long Twentieth Century – MCM’. In MCM’, circulation does not begin with the dissatisfied individual, but with capital itself. Money is invested (M) into the materials and labour necessary to produce a commodity (C), which is then sold for money (M). The difference between CMC and MCM’ is subtle but crucial. The first formula implies that capitalism recurs, and things are made and exchanged, in order to satisfy human desire and need. The second formula implies that money is in charge, that production and exchange are ultimately subservient to profit, and that money begets more money. For Marx, what drives capitalism is not only MCM, but MCM’ – the apostrophe signifying ‘prime’ – or the concept that money increases in value through circulation. The source of this additional, or ‘surplus’ value, is where capital really loses its lustre. This value is gained within labour – in the time spent on the creation and production of a commodity from raw material – and for Marx, its appropriation by capitalists is inherently exploitative.

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Amazofuturism and Indigenous Futurism in Brazilian Science Fiction

In this academic article, the authors explore two contemporary movements associated with the literature and art of the Amazon region: Amazofuturism and Indigenous futurism. Amazofuturism is understood as a subgenre with ties to cyberpunk and/or solarpunk, in which the future of the Amazon region is portrayed in a broadly optimistic light. Indigenous futurism refers primarily to speculative artwork and writing by Indigenous people, which expresses Indigenous perspectives and epistemologies, and/or which centres Indigeneous experience. Indigenous futurism opposes reductive, pessimistic, and exoticising discourses about the Amazon region and Indigenous peoples, challenging Western stereotypes and allowing the complexity of Indigenous voices and perspectives to be shared. Together, both these interconnected movements attest to the power of the speculative imagination in social and political resilience and regeneration.

By Vítor Castelões Gama and Marcelo Velloso Garcia

This essay will explore two contemporary movements associated with the literature and art of the Amazon region: Amazofuturism and Indigenous futurism. We hope that it will increase the visibility of these two interconnected movements, in order to enrich diversity within the art world, and contribute toward a broadening of cosmologies and worldviews beyond dominant Western imaginaries [1]. 

But to do so, let’s start by trying out some definitions. First, Amazofuturism is a subgenre of SF where the Amazon region is represented in a more positive light, often with an aesthetic akin to cyberpunk and solarpunk. Indigenous futurism, on the other hand, focuses on Indigenous worldviews in the context of the SF megatext, and, while doing so, challenges ingrained colonialist assumptions about Indigenous people. Ideally it is also created by Indigenous people. Finally, Brazilian SF, the broadest of these three terms, is simply science fiction from Brazil. It does not necessarily represent either the Amazon region nor Indigenous people at all, and when it does, may do so either positively or negatively [2]. Now, let’s expand a bit on these definitions. 

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