«There must be darkness to see the stars»: How Contemporary Women Writers Have Been Queering the Way to Mixtopic World-Making

In the introduction to a 2017 reprint of The Left Hand of Darkness, Ursula K. Le Guin praised science fiction as a descriptive, rather than predictive, artform enabling the creation of new worlds between the fantastic and the real. Similarly, past the polarity of both apocalyptic scenarios and the utopistic urge of subgenres like Solarpunk, today’s queer speculative fiction starts from reality for the aesthetical re-evaluation of what it means to be human in the 21st century. Focussing on literary works in English(es), this article intends to show how contemporary women writers have been enacting the disruption of such polarity in a number far exceeding that of men, by landing on less rigid forms of dystopia and utopia. By embracing the concept of mixtopia, as proposed by Giuliana Misserville, I will thus attempt to prove how, in a world ravaged by climate change and shaped by A.I., women writers bring to the fore the relevance of a technocritical approach in form and content, queering the material-semiotic nature of sci-fi itself, originally a male-dominated genre, and now a wild land of uncharted territories, full of eco-aware possibilities.