Afterword: Anthropology and Science Fiction

Anthropology and science fiction are interlinked traditions of knowledge production and overlap in several different ways, not least by the fact that each of these practices was shaped by the colonial encounter. This afterword to the special section “The Ordinariness of Cross-Time Relations: Anthropology, Literature, and the Science Fictional” addresses those linkages and suggests that anthropology as a discipline stands to gain from an engagement with speculative and science fiction, for instance, through a questioning of ethnographic realism. [science fiction, speculative fiction, social theory, colonialism, ethnographic realism].