This article concerns the relationship of politics to speculative and fantastical fiction. Surveying work on aesthetics, media analysis, and science fiction (SF) in the discipline, it also seeks to disjoint some common understandings of how politics is found in cultural artifacts by showing that much IR analysis of SF has opted for a reductionist reliance on analogical readings. To do so, the article first sets out the status of the SF genre, and related fields such as fantasy. The case is here presented with greater ambition than is usually the case, paying particular attention to utopia, and arguing for a view of SF as part hinterland of political theory. In the second part, the underlying rationale for pop cultural analysis is revisited, and some standard motifs in the study of SF recapitulated, the better to revise critical common sense. Having expanded the field of inquiry, a third section demonstrates the limits of analogical analysis as currently practiced. The article then elaborates and defends a new distinction between programmatic and expressive sensibilities in SF to revive the case for a more ambivalent and open reading of SF. Having mapped the current limits of pop-cultural IR, and offered a somewhat different cartography, a final section draws out some implications for methods and future discussion.

中文翻译：

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奇幻世界中的政治演说

本文涉及政治与投机和奇幻小说的关系。调查该学科中关于美学、媒体分析和科幻小说 (SF) 的工作，它还试图通过表明对 SF 的许多 IR 分析选择了对类比的还原论依赖，来打破对如何在文化艺术品中发现政治的一些共同理解读数。为此，文章首先阐述了科幻流派的现状，以及奇幻等相关领域。在这里提出的案例比通常情况下更大的野心，特别关注乌托邦，并主张将科幻小说视为政治理论的一部分腹地。在第二部分，重新​​审视了流行文化分析的基本原理，并重述了科幻研究中的一些标准主题，以更好地修正批判性常识。在扩展了探究领域之后，第三部分展示了目前实践中类比分析的局限性。然后，文章详细阐述并捍卫了科幻小说中程序化和表达情感之间的新区别，以恢复对科幻小说更加矛盾和开放的阅读的案例。在绘制了流行文化 IR 的当前限制并提供了一些不同的制图后，最后一部分得出了对方法和未来讨论的一些影响。