Introduction
This chapter unpacks what is at stake in Old Futures’ identification of a queer cultural politics for speculative fiction, in terms of both of queer studies’ approaches to time and scholarship on futuristic cultural production. It offers a brief history of intersections between queerness and speculative temporality and their entanglement with gender and race, before describing the book’s archive and its framing of speculative fiction as a cultural logic that exceeds literary and media genre studies. The chapter also articulates the centrality of reproduction to the project, which crafts an alternative discourse around the dominant heteronormative temporalities that Lee Edelman influentially critiqued in his 2004 book, No Future. In queer studies, reproductive futurism has primarily been an object of critique. In contrast, Old Futures argue that there are many reproductive futurisms, often in conflict and contradiction with one another, whose complexities are unpacked throughout the book.