A Perspective from the Cracks
By Nat Pyper
“…I build my own universe, El Mundo Zurdo… I span abysses.”
—Gloria E. Anzaldúa, “La Prieta,” 1981
I’m beginning to understand science fiction as a poetics.
What do I mean?
I use “poetics” to mean a creative method that allows us to critically apprehend the present. It is a method that has poetic value and takes up poetic space but may not be recognized as poetry itself. I use “science fiction” or “SF” as shorthand for a genre generally concerned with the not-yet in all of its various forms and permutations: speculative fiction, space opera, cyberpunk, skiffy, alternate histories and realities, future histories, soft SF, hard SF, porridge SF, utopia, dystopia, afrofuturism, slipstream, carrier bags, near-nows and far-flungs, and everything in between. For our purposes, when understood as a poetics, science fiction is the simple yet profound insistence that another world is possible.
While SF may depict a future, it is not the future. It’s certainly not the past or the present either. So what is it? Or more precisely, when is it? Samuel R. Delany offers us a clue when he describes SF as “a significant distortion of the present.”1 Isaac Asimov writes that SF offers not predictions but “possible situations.”2 N. K. Jemisin goes further when she states that SF provides “suggestions for coping with the resulting changes.”3 If SF is not the past, the present, or the future, we might describe it as the space in between––a bridge to the stars, a bridge to ourselves.
Let’s imagine the past and the present as celestial bodies. In this imaginary, the past, like a moon, orbits around the present. SF is a technology created by the inhabitants of the present that launches from its surface, orbits in a spiral around it, slingshots around the past (all pasts) and accelerates into the future (all futures) through a gravitational assist. The path that SF takes is its poetics.
ALT TEXT: This drawing depicts science fiction and its relationship to the past, present, and future as a planetary diagram. In the center, a black dot represents the present. A line begins near its surface and spirals around its diameter several times before being pulled by the gravity of another dot on the left which represents the past (all pasts), here depicted as a moon that orbits around the present. The line circles the past and then shoots out in a long orbit around the present and out into unknown space, here depicted as the future (all futures). A disc near the end of the line represents science fiction and the line represents its poetic movement around the past, present, and future. The diagram also resembles an eye.
What do we call this spiralic journey, the movement between here and there?
Gloria Anzaldúa gives us nepantla. Nepantla is a Nahuatl word for an in-between space. It’s a concept that expands on her notions of the borderlands that we find in her seminal work of autotheory Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza. Anzaldúa uses nepantla to describe her own experience as a queer mestiza and those of others “living in between overlapping and layered spaces of different cultures and social and geographic locations, of events and realities—spiritual, historical, creative, imagined.”4 The name that Anzaldúa gives to these cross-dimensional entities is nepantleras. Nepantleras expose “the deep common ground and interwoven kinship among all things and people,”5 and, I would add, all times. They hasten passage from one world to the next.
Nepantla is space filled with risk. It’s space produced by tectonic cataclysm that “shifts you into the crack between worlds.”6 Pain, confusion, and precarity follow. But as Anzaldúa reassures us as she clocks our third eye, “you don’t build bridges to safe and familiar territories; you have to risk making mundo nuevo, have to risk the uncertainty of change.”7 Those who travel through this space between the cracks, who commit themselves to transformation, emerge with tools for terraforming. They have left one place and are headed for another.
In the hands of nepantleras, science fiction is a poetics that allows us to grasp the present, shaped by the past, and carry its contradictions into the future. It is a creative method motivated by urgency, care, and the desire for, or fear of, a different world. We perceive the present, the absurdities, the crises, the injustices, and the freedom struggles that define it, and we resolve to reimagine. We embark on this journey between times so that we might “catch a glimpse of the cosmic order and [our] part in that cosmovisión.”8
Now let us shift...
1 Samuel R. Delany, from “Dichtung und Science Fiction” in Starboard Wine, 1984.
2 Isaac Asimov, from the introduction to Octavia Butler’s “Speech Sounds” in Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine #73, 1983.
3 N. K. Jemisin, from the foreword to Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower, 2019.
4 Gloria Anzaldúa, from “Toward a Mestiza Rhetoric: Gloria Anzaldua on Composition, Postcoloniality, and the Spiritual, An Interview with Andrea Lunsford (1996)” in Interviews/Entrevistas, 2000.
5 Gloria Anzaldúa, from “now let us shift . . . conocimiento . . . inner work, public acts” in Light in the Dark/Luz en lo Oscuro: Rewriting Identity, Spirituality, Reality, 2015.
6 Ibid.
7 Ibid.
8 Ibid.