Looking back on the future

We have come to the end of my wo/andering through Tiptree's science fictional heterotopia. We have been plunged into strange spatio-temporal settings—an interstellar spaceship, the vastness of outer space, indefinite time—and confronted with uncanny events. By reading Tiptree's narrative in the light of a variety of theoretical discourses, heuristic images and intertexts it has proved possible to unlock various possible layers of the text. Aaron Kaye's plot, the alien mother/daughter plot, Lory Kaye's plot— plots which were all anti-plots at the same time. Plots with cosmological, sexual, intra-psychic, moral, mythological, religious and historical dimensions. Plots, moreover, which were detected in readings which are partial and perspectival explorations—sometimes complementary, sometimes colliding—rather than successive stages in a straightforward process of uncovering meaning.

The divergent interpretations in the subsequent chapters basically evolved around what I consider to be the three salient issues of the text: namely, the painful quest for female subjectivity, the figuration of the posthuman and a multiple vision of the divine. What we have seen is that these issues are absorbed in a vehement current of negativity, that is, of violence and annihilation: in the first reading the grotesque annihilation of masculinity dominated the scene; a desperate desire for primordial oneness was excavated in the second reading; the abject directed the focus in the third…