What would it look like for dominant-language fantasy to engage with the living cultures, contemporary politics, and modern histories of Celtic-language communities?
We can see conservative values, fears, and hopes playing out in many Western science fiction works—and patriarchal ideals around motherhood, reproduction, and family are everywhere.
Palestinian/Jordanian author Ibrahim Nasrallah is one of the novelists who critically engaged with the climate crisis in Dog War II (2016), which won the International Prize for Arabic Fiction (IPAF) in 2018.
In colonial south India and in other parts of South Asia, then, there existed established theories of imagination and the mind as well as established literary traditions of fantasy that make the question of the known and unknown, the real and unreal, an impossible one.
Dune: Part II opens with the image of a fetus. It is a CGI rendition of Lady Jessica Atreides’s unborn daughter in the womb, at an undisclosed gestational age but not yet fully formed. In the book, we don’t see Alia until later, as a young child. Yet we see the fetus repeatedly throughout the movie, which is more and more developed in each visual. In the 1970s, feminist scholar Rosalind Petchesky critiqued the use of fetal visuals, such as the Star Child in 2001: A Space Odyssey, for feeding into anti-abortion narratives.[1] In Petchesky’s words, fetal images have “symbolic import” in societies that are hostile towards abortion and reproductive autonomy.[2]