Introduction

Science fiction requires readers to consider the possibility of alternative realities and worldviews. And, as ecocritical scholar Joshua Schuster recognizes, “being a vegan means living in a partially alternate world that has a science fiction feel because it involves continual cognitive estrangement from social norms” (219). To embrace veganism, Schuster argues, is to “call for another world where one stands with animals while disrupting the current order of power, sovereignty, and authority that is built on the exploitations of animals and Earth’s others” (211). Here, Schuster hits upon the core mechanics of science fiction, as influentially described by Darko Suvin, as a genre whose “necessary and sufficient conditions are the presence and interaction of estrangement and cognition, and whose main formal device is an imaginative framework alternative to the author’s empirical environment” as “validated by cognitive logic” (20, 79; italics removed).

Science fiction is also, therefore, an inherently utopian genre, in the sense of “utopia” as a “meditation on radical difference” that “aims at imagining, and sometimes even at realizing a system radically different from this one” (Jameson xii). Broad definitions of utopia such as this encompass both positive “(e)utopian” possibilities and negative “dystopian” ones that nevertheless encourage progression towards more “positive” futures by warning about potential behaviors that should be avoided. Indeed, Suvin himself argues that utopia is merely the “sociopolitical subgenre of science fiction” (76; italics removed). His arguments have been taken up by a number of other influential science fiction scholars – most notably Fredric Jameson, whose Archaeologies of the Future (2005) is often seen as the founding text of twenty-first-century utopian studies. Even those critics who reject science fiction and utopia as “identical” genres maintain a close relationship between the two, so that “there is little doubt that utopia and SF are cognate literary forms” (Milner 90).

As Jameson argues, science fiction and utopia (hereafter “sf”) encourage positive social change by forcing readers to “think the break” with dominant paradigms and ideologies (232). One ideology that has frequently been brought into question throughout sf’s literary history is the dominant Western ideology of “carnism,” or “the belief system [by] which eating certain animals is considered ethical and appropriate” (Joy, Why We Love Dogs 29–30), to which sf authors have regularly represented veganism as a more positive ideological counterpoint.