Abstract

As evidenced by lively international debates and recent developments stemming from Ernesto de Marino’s work on cultural apocalypses and «terror of history» (1977), Science fiction (SF) embodies an interesting object of analysis to understand representations of the future, cultural consumption, and the epiphanies of the sacred in modernity from an anthropological perspective. Besides, as genres, both SF and anthropology are stimulating in relation to their epistemic and literary strategies: by observing how SF narratives familiarise otherness and create upsetting cracks in the world-as-we-know-it, one is offered the opportunity to reflect on anthropological representation and the possibilities and responsibilities of an anthropology as cultural critique. This issue of «Rivista di antropologia contemporanea» explores some possible intersections between anthropology and SF – always keeping in mind that whilst SF is ontologically fictional, in their aspiration to describe reality, ethnography and anthropology can be heuristically fictional only.