The Culture series created by Scottish author Iain (M.) Banks consists of nine novels, one novella and a couple of short stories situated in the same fictional universe. The eponymous Culture is a space-faring (and spacedwelling) civilization, a conglomeration of several humanoid species and sentient machines, most intellectually powerful beings called The Minds. Technological advances made the Culture a post-scarcity society focused on the maximization of personal freedom. The character of its socio-political structure, however, is somewhat unclear. Based on the differences between its internal and external politics, scholars have mostly placed the Culture within the categories of Utopia and Empire. This is, as the present paper argues, a false dilemma since the Culture is simultaneously both and neither of those. The main argument is that the truly adequate label for the political complexities of the Culture civilization was coined only after the untimely death of the author himself – around 2015, when the far (or, some would say, radical) left activists on the Internet coined the phrase Fully Automated Luxury Gay Space Communism. Using both writings of Marx and Engels on the features of communism and Ollman’s systematization of these features, I will try to show that this is indeed the case.

In his article Andrzej Juszczyk focuses on science fiction projects carried out in popular music, including the work of Kraftwerk, Gary Numan and Nine Inch Nails. Juszczyk discusses both the aspects that constitute specific stories within the represented worlds as well as the sound layer responsible for the projects’ highly immersive character. The music and the sounds heard in these artists’ music can be regarded as experimental signs of the future not only because of the subject matter of the songs. An important element of the projects consists in their innovative and original creation process, which goes far beyond the expectations of average listeners.

 This article explores the significance of Earth in the futurological vision presented by Kim Stanley Robinson in his novel titled 2312, maintained in the genre of climate fiction. Intense technological development together with the progressive degradation of the natural environment served as the foundation for a pessimistic perspective, which resulted in the motif of leaving our planet in order to build life anew in other parts of the universe in the literary discourse. Robinson contrasts this direction in thinking about the future with an optimistic narrative, centred around restoration and a return to roots. The text provides an analysis of such an approach, and shows the speculative nature of the picture of humanity outlined in Robinson’s novel. In addition, the aim of the article is to point out the links between the work and a trend which is developing in the space of science fiction – solarpunk.

In his article, Kacper Tochowicz analyses and interprets the ending of Margaret Atwood’s MaddAddam Trilogy. He focuses on the idea of utopia in postapocalyptic literature as a method of negating the systemic assumptions of late capitalism. Taking this context into account, Tochowicz reads the trilogy in the perspective of posthumanist discourse’s search for human and non-human subjectivity. In terms of methodology, Tochowicz’s analysis is based, on the one hand, on the critique of capitalism and, on the other, on the philosophy of posthumanism. Hence, the most important sources of this approach are Fredric Jameson’s reflections of on the place of utopia in the contemporary world and the philosophical theories of Rosi Braidotti and Bruno Latour. Tochowicz’s main goals are, first, to show how Atwood’s novels can be considered as posthumanist utopias, and, to inquire about the role non-human beings in MaddAddam in relation to Homo sapiens. The interpretation’s aim is to describe the mechanisms governing a world in which man no longer occupies a central position.

Kinga Wyskiel’s article concerns the issue of gender in science fiction stories by Julia Nidecka. The following stories have been analysed and interpreted: “Wilki na wyspie” [Wolves on the Island], “Taśmy prawdy” [Tapes of Truth], “Kwiaty w bukiecie” [Flowers in a Bouquet] and “Goniący za słońcem” [Chasing the Sun]. Wyskiel considers two dominant strategies for the representation of femininity in these stories and focuses on Nidecka’s images of the woman scientist and the mutant woman present in them. Wyskiel also points out that gender is an a priori category in Nidecka’s future worlds and that, consequently, the construction of those worlds has been based on the gender matrix.

In this article, Jerzy Stachowicz examines selected literary works the represent the science fiction genre of the interwar period. He focuses on pacifist visions of the future in those works and argues that these scientistic, military, and superpower fantasies have an anti-war potential, and that fantasy literature itself can, to some extent, be regarded as a „pacifist practice”.

The article summarizes the current state of research devoted to the works of Joanna Mueller. The author of the text points out the critical impasse –the decline in interest in the poetry of Mueller, which seems to be caused by the reproduction of interpretive stereotypes about the nature of her works. In turn, the changes in the poet’s writing, which have not been taken into account in the reception, are shown on the example of the analysis of her latest volume, Hista & her sista, published in 2021. The article shows how Mueller’s poetry reveals its emancipatory potential, opposing accusations of excessive intellectualism and exaggerated formal sophistication, which has been said to mask the poet’s conservative worldview. It takes into account the context of Michel Foucault’s thought, whose concept of discourse Mueller draws on as she explores the multiple implications of the title’s notion of hysteria. Indeed, given its discursive and disciplinary nature, the poet performs a significant political subversion of the phenomenon. Hysterical women turn out to be subjects fighting for their own independence by transgressing the boundaries of the norm, while the supposed eternal immaturity of women, who were denied the right to rationality, is transformed into a positive value – it becomes the engine of a revolution.

An interview with the poet Joanna Mueller on the occasion of the twentieth anniversary of her poetic debut, conducted by Katarzyna Szopa.

Poems curling in on themselves or unraveling above, running on ellipses and tumbling out of frames, migrating between truth and lies. Hidden and coming to light, texts about power in relationships, care work and the 'dredging up' of women's communities. The set of texts presented here comes from Joanna Mueller's forthcoming volume titled Trule.

The article is focused on the poetic work of Joanna Mueller. The author is interested in how the issue of the form-of-life is functionalized in her poetry and how her critical project, focused precisely on the modern category of life, translates into strictly literary activities. He begins with a polemic against the accusations of the conservativeness of Mueller’s poetics and her apparent experimentalism, referring to romantic gestures of defending subjectivity rather than its neo-avant-garde transgression, and tries to show how this stance actually is coupled with the feminist, new-materialist struggle for the form-of-life and the unveiling of immaterial labour. The stakes of Mueller’s poetic game, then, are not a poem that articulates social anger or acts as a dialectical negation of the capitalist system but an affirmative lagging that accommodates and secures a precarious life.

The aim of this article is to answer the question about the causes of oversights, silences and shifts in the critical-literary reception of Joanna Mueller’s poetry. The author analyses discussions of the poet’s successive books and demonstrates the workings of what she calls the ‘double standard’ of the language of criticism; this mechanism has enabled repeated gestures to discredit the importance of this poetry, and has its origins in critics’ specific elaboration of the experience and subject of motherhood, whose poetic thematisation is often met with negative critical commentary. This analysis is juxtaposed with an alternative proposal for reconstructing the main line of Mueller’s poetic story of motherhood, a story in which individual personal experience becomes the basis for building a community of women based on experiencing the oppression they share. Joanna Mueller’s work has certainly been recognised by critics and has been widely (albeit irregularly) commented on and described, so the writer functions in the broad field of literary production and popularisation in Poland.

The article is devoted to the interpretation of selected motifs of Z. Po-wieść – the only strictly fictional work of the art critic and art theorist Mieczysław Porębski – in the context of Stefan Szymutko’s concepts and studies. This Silesian literary scholar was particularly interested in the works of Teodor Parnicki, with which the aforementioned “postmodern” historical novel is sometimes compared. Z. Po-wieść depicts the journey of the eponymous character, the reborn Z., through the history of European civilization. Such a plot illustrates the confrontation with “the great history” (history-being) and serves to create a certain overall vision. A comparative reading of Szymutko’s statements and Porębski’s book (as well as some of his other texts) highlights the problem of the relationship between history, reality and literature, which is particularly important for both protagonists of the article. While Szymutko clearly opposes literature (the domain of words) to empirical historical reality, Porębski vindicates the former as a tool for confronting historicity and defending individual existence. In spite of the cruelty of historical reality, artistic creation that corresponds with it allows for the achievement of catharsis and the only indelible “pleasure of history” (Szymutko’s formulation). According to Porębski, myth, like literature belonging to the so-called sphere of the third logical value, has a similar effect. And literature has the ability to give a mythic – timeless – actuality to what is incidental and ephemeral.