If winning can only occur in a competition between equal opponents, someone who isn’t equal will need to adopt a different strategy and let go of the promise, or the curse, of victory. Anna Zett takes up the challenge in this collection of personal science fiction, registering the traces systems of power leave in the body, in its locomotory, nervous and digestive systems. Zett’s voice appears in several textual guises, addressing authority, resistance, trauma and the physicality of language. Dedicated to the feminist revolution, the post-socialist subject of Artificial Gut Feeling questions logocentric and capitalist beliefs about the economy of meaning. This book gathers together fists, guts and brains to gain a deeper understanding of the non-verbal roots of dialogue.

In Molecular Red, McKenzie Wark creates philosophical tools for the Anthropocene, our new planetary epoch, in which human and natural forces are so entwined that the future of one determines that of the other.

Wark explores the implications of Anthropocene through the story of two empires, the Soviet and then the American. From the Russian revolution, Wark unearths the work of Alexander Bogdanov—Lenin’s rival—as well as the great Proletkult writer and engineer Andrey Platonov.

The Soviet experiment emerges from the past as an allegory for the new organizational challenges of our time. From deep within the Californian military-entertainment complex, Wark retrieves Donna Haraway’s cyborg critique and science fiction writer Kim Stanley Robinson’s Martian utopia as powerful resources for rethinking and remaking the world that climate change has wrought.

The Female Man is a classic feminist science fiction novel by American writer Joanna Russ, published in 1975. Four women, Joanna, Jeannine, Janet and Jael, live in four different and parallel worlds. Joanna lives in a world similar to 1970s Earth. Jeannine lives in a world where the Great Depression did not end, WW2 never happened, and Japan is still an imperial power. Janet lives in Whileaway, a Utopian society in the far future where men have long since died out in a gender-specific plague. Jael lives in a dystopia where men and women are fighting an enduring and literal battle of the sexes, where women trade children for resources and young boys have cosmetic surgery to resemble women. As the women are transported into these other worlds and meet one another, their perspectives on gender, identity and the societies in which they each live are radically altered.