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RCAH Professor Eric Aronoff’s New Book Explores Science Fiction, Culture, and the Power of Storytelling

May 13, 2025

  • Professor Eric Aronoff’s new book, Culture’s Futures, examines how science fiction challenges and redefines ideas of culture, identity, and power.
  • Drawing on years of teaching and scholarship, Aronoff reflects on how the book evolved through student conversations and shifting literary perspectives.
  • From classic authors to contemporary voices, the book shows how science fiction serves as a space for negotiating competing cultural visions and imagining alternative futures.

By Jessica Watley | RCAH Senior Communications Intern

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Associate Professor Eric Aronoff of the Residential College in the Arts and Humanities (RCAH) at Michigan State University has spent his career exploring the intersections of literature, anthropology, and cultural theory. His latest book, Culture’s Futures: Science Fiction, Form, and the Problem of Culture (Palgrave Macmillan, 2025), examines how science fiction serves as a powerful space for negotiating and reimagining ideas of culture, identity, and human possibility.

“This book has been a long time coming,” Aronoff said. “It has changed a lot since I began thinking about it 10 years ago. While it has always focused on ideas of culture, identity, power, and literary form, the books and authors I’ve looked at—and the arguments I’ve made—have changed a great deal. And that learning process along the way has been so much fun.”

In Culture’s Futures, Aronoff explores how science fiction engages with questions traditionally addressed by anthropology and literary theory. Far from being just imaginative storytelling, he argues, science fiction is a rich intellectual site where the meanings and boundaries of culture are continually debated, challenged, and reshaped. Aronoff demonstrates how both science fiction and anthropological ethnography, in their modernist forms and postmodern/postcolonial reinventions, are intertwined technologies for constructing “culture” and difference through narrative worldbuilding. This book traces the ways science fiction authors—including Ray Bradbury, Ursula K. Le Guin, and Octavia E. Butler, as well as Indigenous futurists Craig Strete, Celu Amberstone, Rebecca Roanhorse, and Cherie Dimaline—have deployed, interrogated, and revised these models of “culture,” representation, and power to imagine new futures.

Aronoff’s new book “promises to become the standard reference for future scholars exploring the development of social science fiction after 1945,” according to Colorado State University Professor Leif Sorensen, who specializes in 20th and 21st century multiethnic literature, including science fiction.

“Culture’s Futures is a brilliant work of interdisciplinary scholarship,” Sorensen said. “Aronoff addresses a gap in scholarship on science fiction and anthropology by illustrating the complex ways in which both develop their poetics in relation to one another.”

Aronoff, who earned the MSU Teacher-Scholar Award in 2011, credits his RCAH students as a key part of the book’s development.

“Those ideas have developed very much in the great conversations I’ve had with RCAH students in my science fiction classes over the years,” Aronoff said. “So in a real way, every one of those students has had a hand in helping me realize this project.”

Culture’s Futures builds on Aronoff’s earlier work, including his 2013 book Composing Cultures:  Modernism, American Literary Studies, and the Problem of Culture (University of Virginia Press), and reflects his continued interest in how literature addresses questions of identity, belonging, and the future.

“It’s a blast being able to read, think about, talk about, and write about books that I find fascinating,” he concludes. “How great is that?”

Learn more about Aronoff’s work: