Special Issue Call for Papers
Aesthetics, Forms, Readers: New Directions in Science Fiction Studies
Guest editors: Simona Bartolotta, Justus-Liebig University of Giessen; Adele Guyton, UCLouvain; Ciarán Kavanagh, Ghent University
Neohelicon invites article submissions for a special issue on “Aesthetics, Forms, Readers: New Directions in Science Fiction Studies.”
The relationship between aesthetic form and its instrumental functions has long been a productive site of tension within literary and critical theory, acquiring renewed significance in recent methodological debates across the humanities. Science/speculative fiction (SF) offers a particularly instructive case study, having generated a critical tradition that has long framed the genre’s value in terms of its capacity to educate, speculate, critique, politicize, historicize, or otherwise illuminate aspects of the world beyond the text. This tendency runs from early discussions of scientific and technological literacy, through Suvin’s seminal theory of cognitive estrangement, to contemporary calls to mobilize literature toward ethico-social betterment. Recently, however, scholars have begun to interrogate the field’s emphasis on instrumentality, particularly when it elides questions of aesthetics and readerly engagement, or collapses desired use-cases into the genre’s formal definition.
Thus, while approaches that place a premium on instrumentality have generated some of the discipline’s most influential insights and reshaped what counts as SF, they have also left comparatively underexplored a range of fundamental—and not unrelated—questions concerning the aesthetic, formal, and experiential dimensions of the genre. How does SF operate as a distinctive regime of representation? What kinds of aesthetic and culturally situated experiences does it enable? What formal structures, narrative techniques, and imaginative procedures characterize SF texts across different historical periods and media? How do readers negotiate and inhabit SF worlds? What conceptual frameworks are best suited to understanding SF as a literary and artistic practice in its own right?
By foregrounding such questions, this special issue calls for renewed attention to the SF text as an aesthetic object. Rather than treating aesthetics, form, and readerly experience as secondary to the genre’s social or political functions, we seek to foster a new wave of SF theory that places these dimensions at the very center of its inquiry.
We welcome contributions that engage with SF as an artistic (literary or otherwise) phenomenon through close textual analysis, historical investigation, theoretical or philosophical reflection, or the study of the reader’s cognitive or emotional encounter with the SF text. We are particularly interested in work that combines conceptual ambition and rigorous engagement with textual, historical, and cultural evidence, and which investigates SF as an aesthetic object defined by unique formal structures, medium-specific constraints, and affective dimensions.
Potential areas of inquiry include, but are not limited to:
- Aesthetic theories of science fiction
- Historical approaches to science-fictional form
- Genre theory and the definition of science fiction
- Relationships between science fiction and other “genre” fictions
- Reader-response/reader-oriented approaches to science fiction
- Theories of estrangement beyond cognitive estrangement
- Science fiction and affect—wonder, awe, dread, sublimity, or related aesthetic experiences
- Science fiction, the epistemic, and theories of knowledge
- Science fiction, medium specificity, and publication context
- Comparative approaches to science fiction and adjacent genres
- Science fiction and literary value
- Science fiction in and outside the mainstream
- Methodological debates and disciplinary self-reflection within science fiction studies
- Science fiction and the history of ideas
- New approaches to canonical theorists of the field
- Narratological, stylistic, and storyworld-oriented approaches to science fiction
We encourage submissions that engage questions of broader conceptual or methodological significance, whether through direct theoretical intervention or through close textual, historical, or comparative analysis. We particularly welcome contributions that move beyond description or documentation toward critical and conceptual innovation.
Submission guidelines: Please send your submissions to the guest editors at simona.bartolotta@gmail.com; adele.guyton@kuleuven.be; ciaran.kavanagh@ugent.be by 15 December 2026. The submission should include an abstract of 300–500 words, a short biographical note of max. 150 words, and 4-6 keywords. Notifications of acceptance will be sent by 31 January 2027.
Authors of accepted abstracts will be invited to submit full essays by 30 June 2027.
