Abstract

Around the time of the feminist reboot in 2015, several science fiction narratives that offered visions of the future of care work were published. This occurred in the context of increased awareness in the field of literature—which was experiencing a boom of feminist sci-fi writing—regarding the crisis of caring in response to the pandemic. This is also related to artists’ efforts to construct a new discourse, language, and knowledge of care. These stories reject the easy solutions to the problem of care that are dependent on technology; instead, these stories employ a narrative strategy that fully visualizes the problem of care through the imagination of anachronism, according to which the familiar present, which remains unresolved, arrives as the future. In addition, these stories reveal that the problem of caring cannot be easily solved by replacing care work with technology. They also recognize that certain perceptions of caring must change and that the injustice of care work will continue unless there is a reflective intervention. These works present a paradoxical alternative that uses pessimistic imagination and pessimism itself as a source of alternatives. Most importantly, these stories provide fake catharsis through powerful technological solutions, suggesting that the promise of “caring robots” or “caring colonies,” which actually contribute to obscuring the difficult problems of caring, are not an alternative or solution. In this respect, these stories can also be differentiated from existing sci-fi works. These texts show that the mechanization and outsourcing of care cannot solve the problem of care, and they reject the functionalism and separatism that are often involved in this vision of the future. They clarify that care is not a function that can be replaced but rather is a mutual relationship between humans. Since it is a relationship, it is a speculative allegory to say that it is a problem that must be solved integrally within the community. The visions of these writers reject the existing sci-fi imagination that depicts a future that is conquered by science and technology, and they also try to parody the universal male subject magnified by science and technology. They are also in line with alternative and critical thinking about traditional Sci-fi works.