Episode 185 - Anthropology and Science Fiction

See what we did there? We switched the title around! Clever us. This week, in the final installment of an accidental THREE-PART SERIES, we switch the focus to anthropology and anthropologists who create sci-fi or who are characters in sci-fi media. We cover two of the greats: Ursula K LeGuin and Octavia E Butler. We finish up with a roundup of TV and movie anthropologists at various levels from goofy to egregious.

Links

• Speculative Fiction (Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Literature)

• Fractured Fairy Tales (Rocky and Bullwinkle Wiki)

• Indian Epic Poetry & SF Origins (SciFi Fantasy Network)

• Read Mahabharata as science fiction: C Radhakrishnan (Deccan Chronicle)

• Vimana Aircraft of India: More Sloppy Scholarship from David Childress (Jason Colavito)

• Separating fact from ancient Indian science fiction (Live Mint)

• The Story of Urashima Taro, the Fisher Lad (Japanese Fairy Tales, via Lit2Go)

• Hafele–Keating experiment (Wikipedia)

• The Lucian of Samosata Project

• Abdallah the Fisherman and Abdallah the Merman (Wikisource)

• The Left Hand of Darkness (Ursula K. LeGuin)

• The Dispossessed (Ursula K. LeGuin)

• Ursula Le Guin’s Speculative Anthropology: Thick Description, Historicity and Science Fiction (Theory, Culture & Society)

• How Ursula Le Guin’s Writing Was Shaped by Anthropology (Sapiens)

• Introduction: Speculative Anthropologies (Society for Cultural Anthropology)

• The Parable Series (Octavia E. Butler)

• Thinking Parabolically: Time Matters in Octavia Butler’s Parables (Society for Cultural Anthropology)

• Why So Many Readers Are Turning to Octavia Butler’s Apocalypse Fiction Right Now (Slate)

• Octavia Butler (Society for Cultural Anthropology)

• Mothership: Voyage Into Afrofuturism (Oakland Museum of California)

• Afrofuturism: From the Past to the Living Present (UCLA Newsroom)

• When is Wakanda: Imagining Afrofutures (The Long Now Foundation)

• Radical Reproduction: Octavia E. Butler’s HistoFuturist Archiving as Speculative Theory (Women’s Studies)

• The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks (via WorldCat)

• Anthropology in Outerspace (The Geek Anthropologist)

• Forensic TV Post-Mortem: The 5 Most And Least Accurate Episodes Of 'Bones' (Forbes)

Image: Front covers of The Dispossessed (LeGuin) and Parable of the Sowers (Butler)