Gillian Polack

Story Matrices: Cultural Encoding and Cultural Baggage in Science Fiction and Fantasy Gillian Polack

The culture we live in shapes us. We also shape the culture we live in. Stories we tell play critical roles in this shaping.




The heart of cultural transmission is how stories and the way we shape knowledge come together and make a novel work. How do they combine within the novel? Genre writing plays a critical role in demonstrating how this transmission functions.




Science fiction and fantasy illustrate this through shared traditions and understanding, colonialism, diasporic experiences, own voices, ethics, selective forgetting and silencing. They illuminate ways in which speculative fiction is important for cultural transmission.




This study uses cultural encoding and baggage within speculative fiction to decode critical elements of modern English-language culture.