Publication: *JFA*, “Cybernetics and *Ancillary Justice*: Embodiment, Crisis, and Resistance”

This is now a much overdue post, but for sake of completionism I’m happy to share here that my article “Cybernetics and Ancillary Justice: Embodiment, Crisis, and Resistance" was published in late 2022 in the Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts.

I’m very proud of this project, as it touches on my interests in both SF and computing history. It also captures something of my long journey through graduate school and exemplifies the long and winding roads a paper can take as it goes from seminar paper to publication. It originated in Penn State English’s Speculative Fiction seminar, taught by Tina Chen in Spring 2020. My work on it was also informed by readings and conversations with Brian Lennon in a digital studies independent study that semester. With their feedback, I developed it into a conference paper for the Spring 2021 International Conference for the Fantastic in the Arts, where I received the David G. Hartwell Emerging Scholar Award. That award included publication in JFA. I then expanded the piece and revised it during the peer review process.

I’m extremely grateful to my wife Kelly and our family for all of their support throughout my academic endeavors. And for this paper in particular, my thanks goes out to Tina, my classmates in the SF seminar, Brian, the award selection committee at ICFA, and JFA’s editorial teams and peer reviewers for their invaluable direction and advice.

The journal issue (33.2) is available for purchase on the JFA website; if you are affiliated with an academic institution you may have access to it through your library. I’ve included the abstract below.

Abstract

Ann Leckie’s space opera Ancillary Justice represents the cybernetic logics of modern life as a galactic empire of always-connected starships, artificial intelligences, and soldiers. In doing so, Leckie’s novel transformtransforms cybernetics from its current state—a seemingly immaterial, dominant set of logics described by Seb Franklin, building on DeLeuze and Foucault, as a “control episteme”—into corporeal form. This materialization occurs through that lyrical mimesis that Seo-Young Chu describes as characteristic of science fiction, a genre that is a “mimetic discourse whose objects of representation are nonimaginary yet cognitively estranging.”

This act of representation exposes the vulnerabilities of cybernetic systems as inevitably, ultimately embodied, and reminds us of cybernetic logics’ origins in military technologies. I argue that Leckie’s novel opens a path for how these systems might be resisted: by individuals exercising ethical action and performing acts of care in the face of world-ending crises.